Situation Calculus for Synthesis of Manufacturing Controllers

TL;DR

This paper introduces a formal framework using Situation Calculus to synthesize manufacturing process controllers dynamically, enabling manufacturing facilities to bid on complex products by generating process plans on the fly.

Contribution

It extends AI behavior synthesis to relational, formal models in Situation Calculus, providing a decidable approach for dynamic manufacturing controller generation.

Findings

Decidability established for bounded action theories.

Formal framework captures process recipes and resources.

Techniques for synthesizing controllers demonstrated.

Abstract

Manufacturing is transitioning from a mass production model to a manufacturing as a service model in which manufacturing facilities 'bid' to produce products. To decide whether to bid for a complex, previously unseen product, a manufacturing facility must be able to synthesize, 'on the fly', a process plan controller that delegates abstract manufacturing tasks in the supplied process recipe to the appropriate manufacturing resources, e.g., CNC machines, robots etc. Previous work in applying AI behaviour composition to synthesize process plan controllers has considered only finite state ad-hoc representations. Here, we study the problem in the relational setting of the Situation Calculus. By taking advantage of recent work on abstraction in the Situation Calculus, process recipes and available resources are represented by ConGolog programs over, respectively, an abstract and a concrete action theory. This allows us to capture the problem in a formal, general framework, and show decidability for the case of bounded action theories. We also provide techniques for actually synthesizing the controller.