Have you used the customer service app with your bank the past year, or received an unexpected email with an offer you were actually interested in? Maybe it was a well-timed mortgage re-fi or even some savings at a favorite store. There's an enduring and unfortunate misperception that AI serves only to replace human workers and irritate human clients. But what if we don't have to be locked in a zero-sum game with the growing legion of digital intelligence? An increasing number of banks and insurers are finding that it's almost impossible to meet the rising customer expectations and needs that digital services and apps have unleashed.

Karthik Sundaram, Program Manager-The Industrial Internet of Things, Frost & Sullivan – an excerpt from SPS IPC Drives 2018 presentation to be delivered 28th of November 2018 at 2.00-2.30 Situated in a mountain village of Japan is FANUC's widely reported lights out factory. This one of a kind, unmanned factory works autonomously 24/7 and is well known for robots that can assemble, test, and monitor themselves. A few decades ago, such a scenario would have existed only in the pages of Isaac Asimov's science fiction. Today, the FANUC use case is a proof of the dawn of cognitive factories and how far artificial intelligence (AI) has been able to penetrate into the walls of these factories.

We propose the use of causality-based formal representation and automated reasoning methods to endow multiple teams of robots in a factory, with high-level cognitive capabilities, such as, optimal planning and diagnostic reasoning. We introduce algorithms for finding optimal decoupled plans and diagnosing the cause of a failure/discrepancy (e.g., robots may get broken or tasks may get reassigned to teams). We discuss how these algorithms can be embedded in an execution and monitoring framework, and show their applicability on an intelligent painting factory scenario.