A case study of planning for smart factories Model checking and Monte Carlo search for the rescue

• Published in: International journal on software tools for technology transfer Vol. 20; no. 5; pp. 515 - 528
• Main Authors: Edelkamp, Stefan, Greulich, Christoph
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Berlin/Heidelberg Springer Berlin Heidelberg 01.10.2018
• Subjects: Computer Science; Software Engineering; Software Engineering/Programming and Operating Systems; Spin 2016; Theory of Computation; Model checking; Monte Carlo search; Flow production; Action planning
• ISSN: 1433-2779; 1433-2787
• DOI: 10.1007/s10009-018-0498-1

In this work, we propose the application of the SPIN software model checker to a multiagent system that controls the industrial production of goods. The flow of material is buffered on a production line with assembling stations. As the flow of material is asynchronous at each station, queuing is required as long as buffers provide waiting room. Besides validating the design of the system, the core objective of this work is to find concurrent plans that optimize the throughput of the system. In the mapping of the production system to the model checker, we model the production line as a set of communicating processes, with the movement of items modeled as channels. Experiments show that the model checker is able to analyze the system, subject to the partial ordering of the product parts. It derives valid and optimized plans with several thousands of steps using constraint branching in branch-and-bound search. We compare the results with a randomized exploration based on recent advances in Monte Carlo search.