MAIS: Mechanical Automation Integration System

The Mechanical Automation Integration System was an ambitious project aimed at the development of a platform for the automatic control of electroplating plants. We discovered that for this project, the combination of the planning and the scheduling sub-problems was intractable for existing domain-independent planers. In the project we developed a very efficient domain-dependent planner in which we coded the knowledge gained from extensive discussions with domain experts. This resulted in the design and development of an engineering software for the flexible management of a coating plant.

• Scheduling movement of the different cranes among the different tanks;
• Support for complex event detections and handling (e.g. production faults, new jobs with high priority);
• Autonomously reconfigure the internal flow;
• Predict production costs;
• Evaluate optimal scheduling of the production jobs w.r.t. different cost metrics (e.g. waste, energy consumption);

Final clients for the outcome of the project are coating companies operating complex and heterogeneous coating tasks.

General Info

Start Date: 15 Jun 2017
End Date: 31 Dec 2019
Duration: 2.5 years
Funding: Provincia Autonoma di Trento

Partners

• Phox Design & Engineering
• University of Trento