The proposal of Applied Research Solutions, “Energy-aware Smart Planning for Flexible Assembly Line Systems” (ESPLINE), has been selected in the AIPlan4EU Open Call #3 for Use-Cases in October 2022.
The AIPlan4EU project will bring AI planning as a first-class citizen in the European AI On-Demand (AI4EU) Platform by developing a uniform, user-centered framework to access the existing planning technology and by devising concrete guidelines for innovators and practitioners on how to use this technology. To do so, we will consider use-cases from diverse application areas that will drive the design and the development of the framework, and include several available planning systems as engines that can be selected to solve practical problems. We will develop a general and planner-agnostic API that will both be served by the AI4EU platform and be available as a resource to be integrated into the users’ systems. The framework will be validated on use-cases both from within the consortium and recruited by means of cascade funding; moreover, standard interfaces between the framework and common industrial technologies will be developed and made available.
The use case aims to implement and test a planning and optimization layer on a flexible assembly line system in order to generate energy-aware control decisions and manufacturing operation subsequences. The optimisation objectives are directly linked to the overall and operation-wise energy efficiency of the full manufacturing process. Validation on an existing five-station flexible assembly line (including digital twin model) for standardized integration with the AIPland4EU APIs is proposed.
The use case supports the AIPlan4EU objectives in the area of smart manufacturing for various industry verticals such as food processing, automotive and electronics. Bridging the IT and OT environments through the planning and optimization layer is foreseen with adoption of new academic research artefacts (models and methods) within the realistic constraints of an industry use case. The use-case outcomes will be fully integrated into the AI4EU platform through remote testing and experimentation.