SMarTplan: a Task Planner for Smart Factories
  Smart factories are on the verge of becoming the new industrial paradigm,
wherein optimization permeates all aspects of production, from concept
generation to sales. To fully pursue this paradigm, flexibility in the
production means as well as in their timely organization is of paramount
importance. AI is planning a major role in this transition, but the scenarios
encountered in practice might be challenging for current tools. Task planning
is one example where AI enables more efficient and flexible operation through
an online automated adaptation and rescheduling of the activities to cope with
new operational constraints and demands.
  In this paper we present SMarTplan, a task planner specifically conceived to
deal with real-world scenarios in the emerging smart factory paradigm.
Including both special-purpose and general-purpose algorithms, SMarTplan is
based on current automated reasoning technology and it is designed to tackle
complex application domains. In particular, we show its effectiveness on a
logistic scenario, by comparing its specialized version with the general
purpose one, and extending the comparison to other state-of-the-art task
planners.
