Fully Automated Cyclic Planning for Large-Scale Manufacturing Domains

In domains such as factory assembly, it is necessary to assemble many identical instances of a particular product.  While modern planners can generate assembly plans for single instances of a complex product, generating plans to manufacture many instances of a product is beyond the capabilities of standard planners.  We propose ACP, a system which, given a model of a single instance of a product, automatically reformulates and solves the problem as a cyclic planning problem. We show that our domain-independent ACP system can successfully generate cyclic plans for problems which are too large to be solved directly using standard planners.