In: Progress in Artificial Intelligence - IBERAMIA'98, Proceedings of the Ibero-American Conference on AI, Lisbon, Portugal, October 1998, pages 409-420. Volume 1484 of Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence / H. Coelho (Ed.) --- Springer Verlag, 1998.
Abstract: The design of the sequential control program for a manufacturing system is a difficult task which is traditionally carried out by engineers. In this paper we present MACHINE, a nonlinear planner with an automata-based representation of operators, which is able to obtain control sequences for manufacturing systems. These control sequences are an abstract representation of a sequential control program which may be easily translated into real programs expressed as GRACFET charts or Petri nets.