Large-Scale Electroplating Scheduling: A Hierarchical Temporal Planning Approach

Yingkai Xiao, Kebing Jin, Renyong Ma, Hankz Hankui Zhuo

Abstract: With the development of autonomous equipment, hoist scheduling has become a bottleneck for applications in the electroplating industry. Although there are some approaches proposed for this challenging problem, they generally do not scale to large-scale problems. In this paper, we formulate the real-world electroplating scheduling problem as a temporal planning problem in the form of an adapted PDDL and propose a novel hierarchical temporal planning approach to solve the problem efficiently. In addition, we provide a series of real-life benchmark instances that can be used to evaluate the solution of this problem. We show that our approach can effectively find high-quality solutions for large-scale real-life benchmark instances compared to state-of-the-art benchmarks.