Jointly Assigning Processes to Machines and Generating Plans for Autonomous Mobile Robots in a Smart Factory

-- A modern smart factory runs a manufacturing procedure using a collection of programmable machines. Typically, materials are ferried between these machines using a team of mobile robots. T o embed a manufacturing procedure in a smart factory, a factory operator must a) assign its processes to the smart factory's machines and b) determine how agents should carry materials between machines. Existing smart factory management systems solve the aforementioned problems sequentially, limiting the throughput that they can achieve. In this paper we introduce ACES, the Anytime Cyclic Embedding Solver, the first solver which jointly optimizes the assignment of processes to machines and the assignment of paths to agents. We evaluate ACES and show that it can scale to real industrial scenarios. I. INTRODUCTION Modern smart factories are designed to enable flexible manufacturing [1]. A flexible manufacturing system is a system which can produce a variety of different products with minimal reconfiguration [2]. Flexibility can improve a manufacturer's ability to customize products, reduce the time that it takes to fulfill new orders, and lower the costs of producing a new product. To permit flexible manufacturing, a smart factory needs the following two components: 1) Flexible Machines. Flexible machines are general-purpose machines such as CNC machines which can be programmed to carry out a range of manufacturing processes [4].