Advanced Hierarchical Predictive Routing Control of a smart de-manufacturing plant

The application of a novel approach to the routing control problem of a real de-manufacturing plant is presented. Named Hierarchical Predictive Routing Control (HPRC) and recently proposed in the literature, the approach deals with large number of integer inputs and complex temporal-logic constraints by adopting a low-level path-following strategy and a high-level predictive path allocation. Several improvements are presented, including a novel search tree exploration method, lockout detection routines, and plant-specific handling constraints. Simulation results show very good performance and small computational times even with high number of pallets and long prediction horizon values.