Situation Calculus for Controller Synthesis in Manufacturing Systems with First-Order State Representation (Extended Abstract)

Abstract

Manufacturing is transitioning from a mass production model to a service model in which facilities `bid' for previously unseen 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 a supplied process recipe to the available manufacturing resources. First-order representations of the state are commonly considered in reasoning about action in AI. Here we show that we can leverage the wide literature on the Situation Calculus automatically synthesize such controllers. We identify two important decidable cases---finite domains and bounded action theories---for which we provide practical synthesis techniques.