Process and execution planning for manufacturing systems

This paper deals with a system called TPMS (task planning for manufacturing systems). The main aim of this system is to automatically generate programs or sets of commands for robots, AGV´s, numerical control machines, etc., without spending much time programming the flexible manufacturing system components. A description of how to automatically generate a high level plan for the task is presented as well as a methodology to automatically calculate the duration of each operation from the machine program. The main contributions include: to link symbolic and execution planning; the referred aims at working for complete manufacturing systems (not for controlling only one robot); different industrial operations (assembly, welding, drilling, etc.) can be considered at the same time