An Application of Artificial Intelligence Planning Techniques for the Automatic Generation of Control Programs

Introduction This work presents an approach for the application of artificial intelligence planning techniques [1, 11] to the automatic generation of control programs, expressed as GRAFCET charts, for manufacturing systems. They are techniques used to build knowledge-based intelligent systems able to reason about the behaviour of an agent: what actions may be carried out and which are their effects in that environment. Given an environment and a problem which must be solved in this environment, these techniques are intended to find an ordered sequence of available actions which solve the problem. This ordered sequence of actions is called a plan. One of the most appealing aspects of artificial intelligence planning techniques is the strong similarity both between the process of planning and the one of programming and between the concept of plan and the one of algorithm. Although in the beginning this subject was studied under the general topic of automated p