Robotics and Computer Integrated Manufacturing 16 (2000) 225}239

Intelligent planning of Grafcet charts

L. Castillo*, J. Fdez-Olivares, A. GonzaH lez
Departamento de Ciencias de la Computacio& n e Inteligencia Artixcial, E.T.S. Ingeniern& a Informa& tica, Universidad de Granada, 18071 Granada, Spain

Abstract

Manufacturing systems are entering a new age in which the demands of a market in continuous change impose their conditions on
production processes. In this new generation, both the response capability to these demands and a reliable production process are
aspects that are receiving most attention and study. One of the stages that can most a!ect these terms of reliability and time response
is the development of the control program which drives the operation of the manufacturing system, although this subject has received
little attention in the literature. This work provides a new e!ort in this direction and presents MACHINE, an arti"cial intelligence
planner able to automatically obtain Grafcet charts for manufacturing systems.  2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Intelligent manufacturing systems; Arti"cial intelligence planning; Control programs; Grafcet charts

1. Introduction This can be a very di$cult, and sometimes, painful

Manufacturing systems are entering a new age in
which the demands of a market in continuous change
impose their conditions on production processes, from
the design to the operation and maintenance of manufac-
turing systems. In this new generation, both the response
capability to these demands and a reliable production
process are two of the aspects that are receiving most
attention and study. International forums such as re-
search and development programs [1] or special interest
groups [2,3] are being deployed to study and provide
solutions in this direction, looking for fast and sound
manufacturing processes.
These issues are receiving special attention from the
arti"cial intelligence research community arising in
a new, rich and rapidly expanding research area covering
most of the aspects of manufacturing systems, such as
intelligent product and process design, production plan-
ning and scheduling or systems engineering and architec-
tures [4]. However, little attention has been devoted to
the subject of the implementation of the control program
which drives the operation of a manufacturing system.
* Corresponding author. Tel.: #34-958-24-4258; fax: #34-958-24-
3317.
E-mail addresses: l.castillo@decsai.ugr.es (L. Castillo), faro@de-
csai.ugr.es (J. Fdez-Olivares), a.gonzalez@decsai.ugr.es (A. GonzaH lez).
problem during the life-cycle of a manufacturing system
which can become a bottleneck in the achievement of the
goals of reliability and low time response:
E It is usually developed by hand by specialised control
engineers. This means that it is a slow and expensive
process, which is always subject to human error.
E It is hardly adaptable to the life-cycle of the manufac-
turing system. When the manufacturing system layout
or control speci"cations change, new control pro-
grams must be rewritten in order to take these changes
into account. This rewriting process must be very
careful because the quality of the control program may
decrease or, even, new errors may appear due to
interactions with previously written pieces of the
program.
Only very recently, this problem has been approached
by means of arti"cial intelligence planning techniques
[5}7]. The strong similarity between the process of
planning and the process of programming, and also
between the concept of plan and the one of algorithm,
make these techniques actually suited for the automation
of the design of control programs simply by using the
"nal plans of action as control program skeletons. The
aforementioned drawbacks of a design process by hand
are overcome by the use of these knowledge-based tech-
niques, providing an additional e!ort for achieving lower
time response and higher reliability:

0736-5845/00/$ - see front matter  2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
PII: S 0 7 3 6 - 5 8 4 5 ( 9 9 ) 0 0 0 5 9 - 9
226 L. Castillo et al. / Robotics and Computer Integrated Manufacturing 16 (2000) 225}239
E When the knowledge used by these techniques is cor-
rect, the use of arti"cial intelligence planning tech-
niques guarantees that "nal plans will also be correct
and, therefore, free of human errors.
E Due to the growing speed of modern computers, the
time taken to obtain plans is very low, allowing for
a considerable decrease in cost and duration of the
design phase of control programs.
E They allow for an easy adaptation to the life-cycle of
manufacturing systems because if something changes in
a manufacturing system, then now plans are completely
rewritten from scratch in order to take these changes
into account, avoiding a revision process by hand.
In this sense, this work presents MACHINE, a three-
level system, based on arti"cial intelligence planning
techniques which, starting from a knowledge representa-
tion of a manufacturing system in terms of :
E a high-level description of the manufacturing system
layout and start up state of devices,
E a description of raw products, and
E a manufacturing problem, speci"ed as an ordered
sequence of transformations on raw products, i.e.,
a control recipe at phase level [8],
is able to automatically design the "nal control program,
expressed as a Grafcet chart [9], tailored for this prob-
lem, this layout and these raw products.
Section 2 reviews previous works in the literature
around the subject of automatic programming in manu-
facturing systems. Section 3 presents MACHINE, a
three-level knowledge-based system in which the top
level de"nes a knowledge representation of a manufac-
turing system, the intermediate level (the `intelligenta
level) builds the control program skeleton and the lower
level translates this skeleton into a Grafcet chart. Section 4
presents a case study involving several manufacturing
problems which are solved by MACHINE, specially two
real size manufacturing systems. Finally in Section
5 some conclusions and future directions are drawn.
2. Related work
In the late 1960s, the subject of automatic program-
ming was studied under the general topic of automated
program synthesis [10}12] and the techniques used were,
mainly, theorem proving techniques, but however, very
little advance seems to have been made since then. Per-
haps, the problem the of automatic building of programs
is too hard to be faced from a general viewpoint and
research should have been focused on more speci"c do-
mains.
In this sense, the domain of manufacturing systems
is becoming an area of growing interest for researchers
from the "eld of arti"cial intelligence planning
systems providing a more constrained domain of
study.
Historically, one of the most appealing applications of
arti"cial intelligence planning techniques in the literature
has been its application to machining procedures of dis-
crete parts, what is known as computer-aided process
planning (CAPP) [13]. There has been a great deal of
work around this issue [14 }19] including many com-
plementary techniques such as machine learning tech-
niques, hierarchical representations and procedures or
nonlinear planning techniques, but it must be recognised
that, in practice, these systems generally focus on compo-
nents or pieces of the overall manufacturing process [20]
without taking into account some of the operations usu-
ally needed to build a whole control program.
For these reasons, a greater e!ort is being demanded
for developing alternative approaches able to consider
a whole manufacturing system, not only a piece of it [13].
In this direction, the work reported in [21] presented
a system able to obtain Grafcet charts for manufacturing
systems by means of search techniques and a knowledge
base which contains pieces or skeletons of previously
developed control programs. However, the entire process
must be supervised by a human operator, and, therefore,
the system is not completely autonomous.
Other integral approaches have also been developed as
[22], applied to assembly operations, or as in [23] under
the general name of operation procedure synthesis in
chemical domains (an extensive review of this issue can
be found in [24]), but the level of detail of "nal plans of
actions is insu$cient since they may lack some actions
which can be essential for the execution of the control
programs.
These problems, i.e., an integral approach with a su$-
cient level of detail in the results, were initially addressed
in [25,26] where authors present a new planning system,
called MACHINE, able to automatically obtain more
complete plans, containing all of the actions that could
be essential during the execution of the control program,
and it is continued in this work, in which authors present
an extension of this system able to translate these control
sequences into a reliable and lower level representation:
a Grafcet chart that can be used to implement the "nal
control program. This is explained in the next section.
3. A three-level knowledge-based system
MACHINE is an arti"cial intelligence planning system
whose model of action has been speci"cally designed to
describe the transformations that take place in a manufac-
turing system and whose architecture is shown in Fig. 1.
It works at three di!erent abstraction levels: the "rst
one is a knowledge-based representation of a manufac-
turing problem as will be seen later, the second one
represents a possible solution to this manufacturing
L. Castillo et al. / Robotics and Computer Integrated Manufacturing 16 (2000) 225}239 227

Fig. 1. Three-level architecture of MACHINE.

Fig. 2. A simple manufacturing system.

228 L. Castillo et al. / Robotics and Computer Integrated Manufacturing 16 (2000) 225}239

problem expressed as a control program skeleton, that is,
an ordered sequence of actions that must be executed and
which is named as a control sequence, and the third level
represents this program skeleton as a Grafcet chart. Let
us look at these three levels in detail.
3.1. The top level
The most important piece of the top level, which is
used to describe a manufacturing problem, is the model
of action of MACHINE. This model of action [27] is
a sort of speci"cation language, based on the "rst-order
predicate calculus, which has been designed as an exten-
sion of STRIPS [28]. It is a structured representation of
the actions that take place in the manufacturing domain,
their requirements and their consequences in the envi-
ronment. By means of this model of action a knowledge
base is built which contains the description of every type
of device that may be found in a manufacturing system: it
is a library of devices.

Fig. 3. A control sequence which solves the manufacturing problem stated in Example 2.

Fig. 4. Algorithm for translating a control sequence into a Grafcet chart.

 L. Castillo et al. / Robotics and Computer Integrated Manufacturing 16 (2000) 225}239 229

3.1.1. The library of devices Requirements. They are facts that must be satis"ed, i.e.,
This knowledge base must be created and maintained they must be true, for a correct execution of the action.
by a control engineer (whose main task is to provide the They are divided into three di!erent kinds of require-
necessary knowledge to describe the operation of every ments:
device) and a knowledge engineer (whose main task is to
structure that knowledge in terms of the model of action Table 1
of MACHINE). In this sense, every device is represented Logic formulae of transition conditions for the Grafcet in Fig. 5
as an agent connected to other agents and able to carry CT1 (STATE C1 OFF)  (LOCATION BLOCK P1)  (FREE
out a set of actions. The description of an agent has BLOCK P1)  (STATE C2 OFF)  (STATE DRILL
several components and the most important ones are STOP)  (STATE DRILL UP)  (STATE BELT OFF)
these: CT2 (STATE BELT ON)  (LOCATION BLOCK STORAGE)
Name. The identi"cation of the agent.  (FREE BLOCK STORAGE)
CT3 (STATE DRILL DOWN)  (HAS-HOLE BLOCK)
Variables. They represent a set of objects related to the CT4 (STATE DRILL UP)
operation of the agents: raw materials, connection points, CT5 (STATE BELT OFF)
etc. CT6 (STATE DRILL DRILLING)
Actions. This consists of a description of every action that CT7 (STATE C2 ON)  (BLOCKED BLOCK P2)
the agent is able to carry out. Every action of every agent CT8 (STATE C1 ON)  (LOCATION BLOCK P2)  (FREE
BLOCK P2)
is composed of the following components. CT9 (STATE C1 OFF)
Name. An identi"cation of the action. CT10 (STATE C2 OFF)  (FREE BLOCK P2)
CT11 (STATE DRILL STOP)
CT12 TRUE
CT13 TRUE

Fig. 5. The "nal Grafcet chart for the manufacturing problem of

Example 2. Fig. 6. Case 1. A batch system.
230 L. Castillo et al. / Robotics and Computer Integrated Manufacturing 16 (2000) 225}239

Fig. 7. Grafcet chart for case 1.

Previous. They must be true before the action starts.

They act as a kind of preconditioning of the action.
Simultaneous. They must be true during the execution
of the action. They are used to avoid any type of
harmful interaction during the execution of the action, in
such a way that every action which could interfere
with it executes either before or later, but never simulta-
neously.
Later. They must be true after the action. They are
used to leave every device in a safe state every time they
are used to carry out an operation.
Hence, these requirements are a kind of invariant that
must be true before, during and after the action.
E4ects. They are the consequences in environment of the
execution of the action. They are divided into two di!er- Fig. 8. Grafcet chart for case 2.
ent e!ects.
Addition. They are new facts that become true.
Deletion. They are old facts that were true but become
false. Hence, the facts included in the deletion e!ects are
also included in the previous requirements.
 L. Castillo et al. / Robotics and Computer Integrated Manufacturing 16 (2000) 225}239
Fig. 9. Case 3. A discrete manufacturing system.
Example 1. Let us consider the small system shown in
Fig. 2. It is composed of two pistons, a mobile drill and
a belt. Its operation is clear: piston C1 pushes the block
into the drill base, then C2 grasps it, the drill makes
a hole, the block is released and the belt carries the block
into the STORAGE.
In this example, every device is represented as an
agent, but in particular, the drill can be represented
as an agent able to carry out the following four actions:
turn on, turn o!, go down, go up. Let us consider
the action of going down. Its representation would be as
follows:
Name: DRILL-DOWN
Requirements
Previous. The drill must be up.
 This is a literal description. Actually, it is a "rst-order logic repres-
entation which uses a structure based on the LISP programming
language and where every stated fact is represented as a simple literal.
231
Simultaneous. The drill must be on and the object must
be grasped at the base of the drill.
Later. The drill must be up again.
E4ects
Addition. The drill will be down and the object will
have a hole.
Suppresion. The drill is no longer up.
As can be seen, the key aspect of this knowledge base is
the knowledge representation and structure of the opera-
tion of every device. The role of the control engineer is
very important, but the role of the knowledge engineer is
essential since, as noted in [20], the techniques used to
avoid the existing gap between theory and practice in
manufacturing domains tend to be knowledge intensive in
order to de"ne a sound start point in the search of
solutions.
Another important feature of this knowledge base is its
reusability. It is parameterised for many known types of
devices (valves, pumps, belts, mixers, etc.) and, once
232 L. Castillo et al. / Robotics and Computer Integrated Manufacturing 16 (2000) 225}239
Fig. 10. Grafcet chart for case 3.
de"ned, it can be used for the representation of a
manufacturing problem and reused again as new manu-
facturing problems are faced.
3.1.2. Manufacturing problems
A manufacturing problem consists in carrying out an
ordered set of transformation operations on raw prod-
ucts in order to obtain manufactured products. These
problems are represented in MACHINE by three com-
ponents:
E The domain. It is the manufacturing system layout
represented by means of the aforementioned model of
action. Every device in the manufacturing system is
translated into an agent by instantiating its corre-
sponding type in the library of devices.
E The initial state. That is, a description, by means of the
"rst-order predicate calculus, of the start up state of
both devices and raw products.
E The goal of the manufacturing problem. That is, the
recipe [8] of the manufactured product. It is an
ordered sequence of transformations, de"ned on the
formerly represented system, that must be made
on the raw products mentioned above.
Example 2. In Example 1, the system layout would be
represented by means of an agent for every piston, the
drill and the belt, respectively, extracted from the library
of devices. The raw products are very simple: there is
a block next to piston C1. And "nally, the goal is also
very simple: the block must have a hole and it must be
into STORAGE.
In real life, these manufacturing problems are solved
by control engineers, who have a similar knowledge-
based representation, by designing a control program
which would coordinate the operation of the devices of
the manufacturing system to meet the goal speci"ed in
the recipe and, so, to obtain the desired manufactured
product. In this work, the role of the control engineer is
played by the intermediate level of MACHINE, that is,
a planning system which contains the `intelligencea
needed to solve these problems and automatically
design a skeleton of the control program starting from
the knowledge-based description of a manufacturing
problem.
3.2. The intermediate level
The most important piece of the intermediate level is
the planning algorithm which is described in detail in
[26,29]. It is a partial order planner [30] which follows
a basic means end analysis in order to "nd an ordered
sequence of actions of the agents that meet the goal of the
manufacturing problem starting from the initial state
described in the problem. This is called a control se-
quence and may be represented as a pair S"1A,(2
where A is a set of actions and ( an order relation
de"ned on it.
The representation of agents and actions in the manu-
facturing problem allows for an easy reasoning process. If
the goal is a transformation which must be solved and
this transformation is an e!ect of an action, then include
that action in the control sequence to achieve this trans-
formation, but, in order to do that, all of the requirements
of the action, must also be solved by other actions.
Every time an action solves a requirement of another
action, this requirement is protected and the planner
 A strict order relation and not necessarily a total order relation.
 L. Castillo et al. / Robotics and Computer Integrated Manufacturing 16 (2000) 225}239
Fig. 11. Case 4. A reactor-based batch system.
guarantees that none of the actions in the sequence,
neither now nor in the future, will produce a mutual
contradiction with respect to this achieved transforma-
tion. This protection mechanism is usually known as
a causal link [26,30,31].
The causal link protection mechanism is the most
important means to guarantee that, not only all of the
requirements of the actions in a control sequence have
been satis"ed, but also that none of the actions contra-
dicts the requirements of other actions. If a contradiction
between an action and a causal link is detected (this is
called a threat) then it is solved by reordering the action
and the causal link, giving priority to the causal link or to
the action, respectively, in such a way that the contradic-
tion disappears [26].
This process is repeated following a best "rst search
process [6] until there are no pending transformations or
requirements to be solved. The "nal result of the plann-
ing algorithm is a control sequence S"1A,(2, that is,
an ordered sequence of actions of the agents of the
manufacturing problem which achieves the goal.
Example 3. Let us consider again the manufacturing
problem presented in Example 2. The control sequence
designed by MACHINE for solving this problem is
shown in Fig. 3. This control sequence has been auto-
matically designed by MACHINE in 5.85 s.
 Running on a Pentium II under Linux operating system.
233
A control sequence is not actually a control program,
but it may be considered as a skeleton of the control
program since it contains all the knowledge necessary to
translate it into a lower level representation. In fact,
a control sequence has several of the most important
features that control programs are expected to have:
E Discrete state space, that is, the states of the system are
represented in a logic or symbolic form instead of
a numeric form.
E Event driven, that is, its evolution can be described by
means of a sequence of discrete events. Every event
may be considered as the execution of an action in the
control sequence, which produces a perfectly known
set of qualitative changes in the environment repre-
sented as the e!ects of the action.
E Asynchronous operation. Events do not appear re-
lated to an exact notion of time, instead, they take
place following a relative order between them: the
order speci"ed in the control sequence.
E Parallelism, that is, several actions may execute simul-
taneously. MACHINE builds parallel sequences
whenever it is possible and the actions in parallel
branches do not interfere, in other cases, actions will be
in sequence. For example, once piston C1 has been
extended, and therefore, the block is pushed into the
base of DRILL, then it is retracted again and C2 is
extended, both simultaneously. On the other hand,
since C2 must be grasping the block during the drilling
process, it cannot be retracted until DRILL is up
because, in that case it will produce a violation of
a simultaneous requirement.
234 L. Castillo et al. / Robotics and Computer Integrated Manufacturing 16 (2000) 225}239

Fig. 12. Grafcet chart for case 4.

E Nondeterminism, that is, from a starting state, there
can be several di!erent, but valid, evolutions. In this
case, actions in parallel branches execute independent-
ly of each other and they can follow di!erent evolu-
tions.
As can be seen, a control sequence has two dummy
actions called START and END, respectively. These ac-
tions are used to delimit the control sequence, but, in
addition, action START is used to generate the start up
state of both raw products and devices in the following
 L. Castillo et al. / Robotics and Computer Integrated Manufacturing 16 (2000) 225}239
Fig. 13. Case 5. A real-world manufacturing system.
way. This initial state consists of a set of facts that
describes what is true at the beginning of the problem,
then this set of facts is `codeda as the e!ects of the action
START.
As said before, a control sequence is not a control
program. It is rather a high-level representation of such
programs, but it contains all the knowledge needed to
build a real control program, i.e., the representation of
every action, its requirements and e!ects. The next sec-
tion shows how to translate these control sequences into
a lower-level representation exploiting these sources of
knowledge.
3.3. The lower level
The algorithm for translating a control sequence into
a Grafcet chart is very important since it allows to
represent a control sequence, and all of the knowledge
embedded in it, as a formalism which could be directly
employed by a control engineer. It builds up a Grafcet
chart in the following terms:
E Every stage contains only one action of the sequence,
and the order relation between the stages is induced by
the order relation in the control sequence. The action
in every stage could be represented as an output signal
to the corresponding device.
E Transition conditions after a stage are built by means
of the addition e!ects of every action meaning that the
action has achieved all of its e!ects and that the execu-
tion of the chart may continue with the following
235
stage(s). Every literal could be represented as a logical
variable which can be implemented either as an input
of the control system (when the information provided
by the variable comes from a sensor in the manufactur-
ing system) or as an internal or timed variable of such
a control system.
E Additional stages, containing a dummy waiting
action, are included in the chart at the end of parallel
branches in order to synchronise the end of these
branches.
The algorithm for translating a control sequence
S"1A,(2 into a Grafcet chart is shown in Fig. 4.
Example 4. Finally, the Grafcet chart for the example
presented in the beginning is the one shown in Fig. 5.
A detailed description of transition conditions is shown
in Table 1. The "rst action can be considered as an
initialisation action which de"nes the start up know-
ledge, as can be seen in the description of condition CT1.
Next, two parallel branches have been designed by
MACHINE in order to push and grasp the block and,
at once, to turn on the drill. Once the block is grasped
(CT7), the drill goes down and up again, making the hole,
and then, only when piston C2 has retracted (CT10), the
belt carries the block into the storage. When the block is
into storage (CT2) the belt is stopped and the program
ends.
As can be seen, this detailed Grafcet chart could be
directly implemented in most control systems.
236 L. Castillo et al. / Robotics and Computer Integrated Manufacturing 16 (2000) 225}239

Fig. 14. Grafcet chart for case 5.

 L. Castillo et al. / Robotics and Computer Integrated Manufacturing 16 (2000) 225}239 237

Table 2
Logic formulae of transition conditions for the Grafcet in Fig. 14

CT1 (STATE MP OFF)  (STATE MV OFF)  (STATE MV2 OFF)  (STATE EP OFF)  (STATEEV OFF)  (STATE MIX1 OFF)
 (STATE HEAT1 OFF)  (STATE SV OFF)  (STATE ST1 OFF)  (STATE ST2 OFF)  (STATE V1 OFF)  (STATE B1 OFF)
 (STATE V2 OFF)  (STATE HEAT2 OFF)  (STATE MIX2 OFF)  (STATE AV OFF)  (STATE AP OFF)  (STATE ASI
OFF)  (STATE AS2 OFF)  (STATE BELT1 OFF)  (STATE VB2 OFF)  (STATE BP OFF)  (STATE BOTTLER OFF)
 (STATE BELT2 OFF)  (CONTAINS MILK MILK-TANK)  (TEMP MILK LOW)  (CONTAINS ENZYME ENZYME-
TANK)  (CONTAINS FLOUR ADDITIVE1)  (CONTAINS COCOA ADDITIVE1)
CT2 (STATE BOTTLER ON)  (BOTTLED MILK)
CT3 (STATE AP ON)  (ADDED MILK COCOA)  (FLOW COCOA RTANK TANK2)  (FLOWIING COCOA RTANK TANK2 AP)
CT4 (STATE AP OFF)
CT5 (STATE BOTTLER OFF)
CT6 (STATE AV ON)  (OPEN-FLOW COCOA TRANK TANK2)  (OPENING-FLOW COCOA RTANK TANK2 AV)
CT7 (STATE MIX2 ON)  (MIX MILK TANK2)  (MIXING MILK MIX2)
CT8 (STATE B1 ON)  (CONTAINS MILK TANK2)  (FLOW MILK TANK1 TANK2)  (FLOWING MILK TANK1 TANK2 B1)
CT9 (STATE HEAT1 ON)  (TEMP MILK HIGH)
CT10 (STATE HEAT1 OFF)
CT11 (STATE B1 OFF)
CT12 (STATE MIX2 OFF)
CT13 (STATE AV OFF)
CT14 (STATE ST1 ON)  (OPEN-FLOW STEAM BOILER HEAT1)  (OPENING-FLOW STEAM BOILER HEAT1 ST1)
CT15 (STATE MIX1 ON)  (MIX MILK TANK1)  (MIXING MILK MIX1)
CT16 (STATE MP ON)  (CONTAINS MILK TANK1)  (FLOW MILK MILK-TANK TANK1)  (FLOWING MILK MILK-TANK
TANK1 MP)
CT17 (STATE MP OFF)
CT18 (STATE MIX1 OFF)
CT19 (STATE ST1 OFF)
CT20 (STATE MV ON)  (OPEN-FLOW MILK MILK-TANK TANK1)  (OPENING-FLOW MILK MILK-TANK TANK1 MV2)
CT21 (STATE MV2 OFF)
CT22 (STATE V2 ON)  (OPEN-FLOW MILK TANK1 TANK2)  (OPENING-FLOW MILK TANK1 TANK2 V2)
CT23 (STATE V2 OFF)
CT24 (STATE MV ON)  (OPEN-FLOW MILK MILK-TANK P1)  (OPENING-FLOW MILK MILK-TANK P1 MV)
CT25 (STATE MV OFF)
CT26 (STATE SV ON)  (OPEN-FLOW STEAM BOILER P2)  (OPENING-FLOW STEAM BOILER P2 5V)
CT27 (STATE SV OFF)
CT28 (STATE BELT2 ON)  (CONTAINS BOTTLES BOTTLER)  (FLOW BOTTLES BOTTLES-STORAGE BOTTLER)  (FLOW-
ING BOTTLES BOTTLES-STORAGE BOTTLER BELT2)
CT29 (STATE BELT1 ON)  (CONTAINS COCOA RTANK)  (FLOW COCOA ADDITIVE1 RTANK)  (FLOWING COCOA
ADDITIVE1 RTANK BELT1)
CT30 (STATE V1 ON)  (OPEN-FLOW MILK TANK B1)  (OPENING-FLOW MILK TANK1 B1 V1)
CT31 (STATE V1 OFF)
CT32 (STATE BELT1 OFF)
CT33 (STATE BP ON)  (CONTAINS MILK BOTTLER)  (FLOW MILK TANK2 BOTTLER)  (FLOWING MILK TANK2
BOTTLER BP)
CT34 (STATE BP OFF)
CT35 (STATE AS1 ON)  (OPEN-FLOW COCOA ADDITIVE1 BELT1)  (OPENING-FLOW COCOA ADDITIVE1 BELT1 AS1)
CT36 (STATE AS1 OFF)
CT37 (STATE BELT2 OFF)
CT38 (STATE VB2 ON)  (OPEN-FLOW MILK TANK2 BOTTLER)  (OPENING-FLOW MILK TANK2 BOTTLER VB2)
CT39 (STATE VB2 OFF)
CT40 TRUE
CT41 TRUE
CT42 TRUE
CT43 TRUE
CT44 TRUE

4. A case study have been instantiated from the library of devices of

This section shows the performance of MACHINE in
"ve selected examples including batch and discrete
manufacturing and two real-world examples (case 4
and 5). All of the devices which appear in these problems
MACHINE. The "nal Grafcet chart is shown in all of the
cases but, since a detailed description of every transition
condition in a chart would be di$cult to show due to its
excessive length, only a detailed table of transitions con-
ditions is shown for case 5. Although some charts seem
238 L. Castillo et al. / Robotics and Computer Integrated Manufacturing 16 (2000) 225}239
quite complex, the facts that control sequences are free of
harmful interactions between their actions (because of
the causal link protection mechanism) and that Grafcet
charts have been built on the basis of these control
sequences, guarantee that Grafcet charts are also free of
harmful interactions between their stages.
4.1. Case 1: A transportation problem
The layout of the manufacturing system is shown
in Fig. 6. The problem to be solved is the transporta-
tion of WATER and ACID to TANK3 and TANK4,
respectively.
In this case, this is an easy transportation problem
which can be carried out in parallel, as can be seen in the
Grafcet chart shown in Fig. 7. MACHINE obtains this
chart in 26 s.
4.2. Case 2: Another transportation problem
This problem is de"ned on the same manufacturing
system as that shown in Fig. 6. However, now the prob-
lem is more di$cult since WATER must be carried into
TANK4 and ACID into TANK3. As can be seen, this
transportation problem cannot be solved in parallel,
since it would produce an undesired mixing of products.
MACHINE solves the problem in 255 s and it designs
the Grafcet chart shown in Fig. 8 in which the transpor-
tation of both products is carried out sequentially.
4.3. Case 3: A discrete manufacturing problem
The layout of the system is shown in Fig. 9. The
problem to be solved consists of the following steps:
1. Drill PIECE-1 (initially in IN-BUF1).
2. Mill PIECE-2 (initially in IN-BUF2).
3. Carry both pieces into the assembling machine.
4. Assembly.
5. Carry the "nal piece to OUT-BUF.
This problem is solved by MACHINE in 187 s by
means of the Grafcet chart shown in Fig. 10. The machin-
ing of PIECE-1 and PIECE-2 in parallel, the assembly
and, "nally, the operation of the robot arm, are all shown
in this "gure.
4.4. Case 4: A problem involving a reactor
This problem is extracted from [32] and the layout of
the system is shown in Fig. 11. In this batch problem
there are three types of raw products: an ingredient A,
stored in tank T-501, an ingredient B, stored in
tank T-505 placed somewhere out of the system,
and an ingredient C stored in tank T-504 also out of the
system.
The manufacturing problem is de"ned by the following
sequence of transformations:
1. STEP 1. Add ingredient B to ingredient A in reactor
R-501. During this operation, the mixture must be in
agitation.
2. STEP 2. Heat the mixture.
3. STEP 3. Add ingredient C to the mixture maintaining
the agitation. During this mixing operation a residual
gas is generated which must be evacuated through the
scrubber S-501. Part of this gas is condensed and it
precipitates at the bottom of S-501. Once the mixing
operation ends, this residual liquid must be carried
into the external tank T-503.
4. After the addition of ingredient C, the mixture must be
cooled and carried into tank T-502.
As can be seen, this problem de"nition is a control
recipe speci"ed at phase level [8,32]. In this case,
MACHINE solves the problem in 5477 s by designing
the Grafcet chart shown in Fig. 12.
4.5. Case 5: A dairy products problem
The system is shown in Fig. 13. This manufacturing
system is inspired by a real problem, and it is composed
of 24 di!erent interconnected agents (pumps, valves,
mixers, heaters, belts, and a bottler). The design of a con-
trol program for such a system is di$cult, even for
a control engineer, due to the number of agents and the
total number of available actions.
The goal in this case consists in adding an ingredient
(initially contained in ADDITIVE-1) to the milk initially
contained in MILK-TANK and then proceed to bottle
the mixture. In this case, MACHINE obtains the Grafcet
chart of Fig. 14 in 1836 s. A detailed description of
transition conditions is shown in Table 2.
These "ve problems show that MACHINE, a
computer program based on arti"cial intelligence plann-
ing techniques, is able to automatically design Grafcet
charts for real-size manufacturing problems and that
these Grafcet charts are free of human errors (mainly due
to the causal-link-based protection mechanism).
5. Some conclusions
MACHINE is a three-level knowledge-based system
which is able to recognise manufacturing problems de-
scribed by means of its library of devices, which is able to
automatically design a Grafcet chart which solves that
manufacturing problem and which can be directly imple-
mented in most control systems. This directly implies
great advantages, specially in what new generation
manufacturing systems are concerned about.
Starting from a correct description of devices, the use
of arti"cial intelligence planning techniques allows for an
 L. Castillo et al. / Robotics and Computer Integrated Manufacturing 16 (2000) 225}239
autonomous process that obtains a Grafcet chart which
is free of human design errors.
MACHINE and the use of modern computers allows
for a rapid prototyping process, that considerably reduc-
es the cost and duration of the development phase of
control programs allowing for a faster response time.
If the layout of the manufacturing system changes or
production needs are rede"ned, then new results can be
completely and quickly redesigned to meet the new speci-
"cations. In addition, this avoids the need for a revision
and rewriting of old control programs which could have
again new human errors.
However, although these advantages are very
interesting, MACHINE must be, in fact, considered as
a step forward in this direction and it still can be ex-
tended with some kind of arithmetic reasoning, or man-
agement of uncertainty for incorporating sensing
information into the building of Grafcet charts with
conditional branches.
Since the results obtained are very good and, in fact,
they could be directly applied in many cases achieving
sound results and very fast, these topics will receive
further study with the goal of achieving a full applicabil-
ity of the results automatically obtained by MACHINE.
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