Thesis topic: Automatic task planning for automation systems

Supervisor: Jacek Malec

Background: 
AI planning is an NP-complete problem in general. There are advances
in both general planning methodology and domain-specific
solutions. International Conference on Automatic Planning and
Scheduling (ICAPS), among others, organizes a yearly constest for most
efficient planning systems, providing a set of benchmarks spanning a
number of domains. The planning systems tested there form presentation of
state-of-the-art solutions in automatic planning.

The focus of this work is factory automation and automated production,
usually roboticised. The question to be answered is: 

What is the best possible level of automatic planning achievable using
existing solutions, that could be applied in the context of factory
automation.

The domain is specified by the context of research project Rosetta,
i.e. robotized assembly (although other kinds of manufacturing are of
interest here as well). It is important that the plan developed by the
proposed system creates simulation code possible to be used in the
context of a well-developed simulation tool.

Within Rosetta the assumed knowledge representation methods are:
1. set of possible operations (skills), stored in an ontology
expressed using OWL-DL (e.g. drill, grip, move)
Those operations have some internal structure, but one
of the tasks of the project is to investigate how detailed should
skill representation be and how should it look like.
2. set of available devices performing the operations (e.g. robot,
inspection-station, camera, drilling-machine)
The list of all available devices is stored in a simple database
consistent with the structure of ontology, where devices are leaves of
the concept tree.
3. Task specification (goal in AI terms) is preferably done using Grafchart
language. Only the graphical part of Grafchart is used in this
context!
4. The targetted simulation tool may be 3DCreate from Visual Components or
RobotStudio from ABB.

Some obvious starting questions:

1. how to represent operations
2. how to represent knowledge about the world
3. which planning system to use
4. how to use the results in order to get the simulation program

Notes:

Grafchart is NOT a language that must be used in the project. There exist
tools that may be used to analyse already existing task descriptions:
JGrafChart (available for several platforms)

3DCreate is NOT the simulation tool that must be used in the
project. However, in this case it seems to be the easiest one to use,
already available, with existing pieces of software that may be reused
www.visualcomponents.com

Contact and more information:
Jacek Malec, jacek.malec@cs.lth.se, 046-2224950, office: E:4132A