Structured reactive controllers and transformational planning for manufacturing

While current manufacturing systems are built to avoid uncertainty, the increase of setup reconfiguration frequency and ever higher numbers of variants produced on the same systems motivate the exploration of new approaches to manufacturing and manufacturing control. In this paper we discuss the application of plan based controllers and transformational planning in manufacturing. Autonomous control techniques are used to create flexible, robust and adaptive behaviour in the artificial intelligence community for about 20 years. In order to show the applicability and adequacy of plan based control in manufacturing, we examplify the approach in a Flexible Manufacturing System (FMS). The experiments show that significant performance boosts are possible through transformational planning.