Situation calculus for controller synthesis in manufacturing systems with first-order state representation

Abstract Manufacturing is transitioning from a mass production model to a service model in which facilities ‘bid’ to produce products. To decide whether to bid for a complex, previously unseen product, a facility must be able to synthesize, on the fly, a process plan controller that delegates abstract manufacturing tasks in a supplied process recipe to the available manufacturing resources. Often manufacturing processes depend on the data and objects (parts) they produce and consume. To formalise this aspect we need to adopt a first-order representation of the state of the processes. First-order representations of the state are commonly considered in reasoning about action in AI, and here we show that we can leverage the wide literature on the Situation Calculus and ConGolog programs to formalise this kind of manufacturing. With such a formalization available, we investigate how to synthesize process plan controllers in this first-order state setting. We also identify two important decidable cases—finite domains and bounded action theories—for which we provide techniques to actually synthesize the controller.