Publication

C. Leet, A. Sciortino and S. Koenig. Jointly Assigning Processes to Machines and Generating Plans for Autonomous Mobile Robots in a Smart Factory. In IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), pages 16298-16304, 2025.

Abstract: A modern smart factory runs a manufacturing procedure using a collection of programmable machines. Typically, materials are ferried between these machines using a team of mobile robots. To embed a manufacturing procedure in a smart factory, a factory operator must a) assign its processes to the smart factory's machines and b) determine how agents should carry materials between machines. A good embedding maximizes the smart factory's throughput; the rate at which it outputs products. Existing smart factory management systems solve the aforementioned problems sequentially, limiting the throughput that they can achieve. In this paper we introduce TC-ACES, the Anytime Cyclic Embedding Solver, the first solver which jointly optimizes the assignment of processes to machines and the assignment of paths to agents. We evaluate TC-ACES and show that it can scale to real industrial scenarios.

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