Synthesising Provably Correct Controllers for Manufacturing

20^th November 2018, 13:00 Ashton Lecture Theater
Dr. Brian Logan
School of Computer Science
University of Nottingham

Abstract

Manufacturing companies are increasingly faced with demands for variable volumes of high quality customised products, produced rapidly and at low cost. One way of meeting such demands is through increased automation, and in particular allowing production control software greater autonomy in determining how products will be manufactured. A key challenge in realising the potential of autonomous manufacturing is moving from human-authoring of the production control software that specifies how a particular product should be made, to the automated synthesis of controllers that are able to manufacture any instance of a given product type on a particular production or assembly line. In this talk, I will present some of our recent work on synthesising controllers for manufacturing and assembly tasks. I will briefly explain how production "recipes" and production resources are formalised, and describe a technique for synthesising a controller capable of orchestrating the behaviours of the production resources to produce (multiple) instances of a product type in accordance with the recipe.