Department of Computer, Control and Management Engineering

Manufacturing is transitioning from a mass production model to a service model in which facilities ‘bid’ for products. To decide whether to bid for a previously unseen product, a facility must be able to synthesize, on the fly, a process plan controller that delegates abstract manufacturing tasks in the process recipe for the product to the available manufacturing resources. First-order state representations are commonly used in reasoning about action in AI. Here we show that we can leverage the extensive literature on the Situation Calculus to automatically synthesize such controllers. We identify two important decidable cases—finite domains and bounded action theories—for which we provide practical synthesis techniques.