A Hierarchical Temporal Planning-Based Approach for Dynamic Hoist Scheduling Problems

TL;DR

This paper introduces a hierarchical temporal planning approach for large-scale hoist scheduling in electroplating, demonstrating high-quality solutions and scalability compared to existing methods.

Contribution

It formulates hoist scheduling as a new temporal planning problem and proposes a hierarchical approach to efficiently solve large-scale instances.

Findings

Efficiently solves large-scale real-life benchmark instances.

Outperforms state-of-the-art baseline methods.

Provides a new benchmark collection for evaluation.

Abstract

Hoist scheduling has become a bottleneck in electroplating industry applications with the development of autonomous devices. Although there are a few approaches proposed to target at the challenging problem, they generally cannot scale to large-scale scheduling problems. In this paper, we formulate the hoist scheduling problem as a new temporal planning problem in the form of adapted PDDL, and propose a novel hierarchical temporal planning approach to efficiently solve the scheduling problem. Additionally, we provide a collection of real-life benchmark instances that can be used to evaluate solution methods for the problem. We exhibit that the proposed approach is able to efficiently find solutions of high quality for large-scale real-life benchmark instances, with comparison to state-of-the-art baselines.