PlanPAS: PLC and automated planning integration.

The application of intelligent systems in industrial environments is still restricted, although autonomous systems based on artificial intelligence (AI) techniques have been under development for over 50 years and spreading into several areas since the last decade. Such integration goes against cultural and technical factors found on the shop floor and its project is often challenging. Classical industrial systems make use of programmable logic controllers (PLCs), which centralise control by using a simple and low-level language. Automated planning solutions use a formal language called planning domain definition language (PDDL) to address specific problems, with predefined initial and target scenarios. Such feature seems to be interesting in some cases, since the generic domain models cannot predict all possible scenarios in a domain. Therefore, the applicability of intelligent systems in industrial cases is directly linked to the development of applications that allow integrating different languages, thus ensuring the access to PLCs and analysing specific situations. The current paper presents an application that integrates automated planning solution and PLCs as well as analyses such integrations’ functionality. Preliminary results are shown by using object process control (OPC) and TCP/IP client/server approaches. A comparison with classical approaches was presented for a specific case study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]