On-line Scheduling and Planning of Robots and Presses

The work reported in this paper deals with the application of Expert Systems (ES) approach to the scheduling and planning of a set of presses and robot feeders in an automobile factory. This work has been usually done by experts in the field with a sound knowledge in all the related topics: Processes, requirements, priorities, constraints, options and decision timing. One of the most important constraints is the response time. So, time constraints have been considered in the design and implementation of the ES solution. In the first section of this paper, a description of the process is presented, pointing out the features of the application, the structure of the ES, and the temporal constraints. In the next section, an overview of the model used to represent the temporal knowledge will show the possibilities of this approach. Finally, the main ideas of this application are discussed, and preliminary results are shown.