A Hierarchical Temporal Planning-Based Approach for Dynamic Hoist Scheduling Problems
This addresses a domain-specific problem in the electroplating industry, offering an incremental improvement for scheduling autonomous devices.
The paper tackles the hoist scheduling bottleneck in electroplating by formulating it as a temporal planning problem and proposing a hierarchical approach, which efficiently finds high-quality solutions for large-scale real-life benchmarks compared to state-of-the-art baselines.
Hoist scheduling has become a bottleneck in electroplating industry applications with the development of autonomous devices. Although there are a few approaches proposed to target at the challenging problem, they generally cannot scale to large-scale scheduling problems. In this paper, we formulate the hoist scheduling problem as a new temporal planning problem in the form of adapted PDDL, and propose a novel hierarchical temporal planning approach to efficiently solve the scheduling problem. Additionally, we provide a collection of real-life benchmark instances that can be used to evaluate solution methods for the problem. We exhibit that the proposed approach is able to efficiently find solutions of high quality for large-scale real-life benchmark instances, with comparison to state-of-the-art baselines.