A Planning-Based Architecture for a Reconfigurable Manufacturing System

The paper describes a novel use of planning in Reconfigurable Manufacturing. Authors considered the nodes of a manufacturing plant as individual AI-based agents able to reason on continuously updated representation of their domain model, plan their own actions, and execute them. The paper aims at clarifying the role of planning, its connection with both a goal selection mechanism, and the agent's knowledge. It describes in detail how a planning system has been customized for the task of planning and execution and shows results of a realistic simulation on a manufacturing plant.