Automatic Synthesis of Control Programs in Polynomial Time for an Assembly Line

The industry wants provably correct and fast formal methods for handling combinatorial dynamical systems. One example of such problems is error recovery in industrial processes. We have used a provably correct, polynomial-time planning algorithm to plan for a miniature assembly line, which assembles toy cars. Although somewhat limited, this process has many similarities with real industrial processes. By exploring the structure of this assembly line we have extended a previously presented algorithm, thus extending the class of problems that can be handled in polynomial time. The planning tool presented here contains general-purpose algorithms that generate plans in the form of GRAFCET charts that are automatically translated into PLC code using a commercial PLC compiler