Timed automata based scheduling for a miniature pipeless plant with mobile robots

In this contribution we present a conceptual idea on modeling a scheduling problem in a miniature pipeless plant with mobile robots by timed automata (TA) and solving it using reachability analysis. Two TA-based tools, TAOpt and UPPAAL, are evaluated on the miniature pipeless plant, and on job shop benchmark instances from the OR literature. The comparative study shows that the proposed modeling approach handles the crucial constraints of the miniature pipeless plant in an effective and straightforward way.