Industrial-Scale Environments with Bounded Uncertainty: A Productivity Maximisation Challenge

We present an outline of the operating domain for control software in Ocado warehouses, and provide results which suggest that in this well-understood and highly controlled environment, there are limits to the uncertainty which planning and control systems need to consider. More specifically, that planning approaches can be biased towards rapid recovery when something goes wrong, rather than trying to deal with all possible eventualities up-front. Since academic interest has generally focused on complex and highly fault-tolerant up-front planning, we believe this domain and planning approach is fertile ground for further investigation.