  Hoist scheduling has become a bottleneck in electroplating industry
applications with the development of autonomous devices. Although there are a
few approaches proposed to target at the challenging problem, they generally
cannot scale to large-scale scheduling problems. In this paper, we formulate
the hoist scheduling problem as a new temporal planning problem in the form of
adapted PDDL, and propose a novel hierarchical temporal planning approach to
efficiently solve the scheduling problem. Additionally, we provide a collection
of real-life benchmark instances that can be used to evaluate solution methods
for the problem. We exhibit that the proposed approach is able to efficiently
find solutions of high quality for large-scale real-life benchmark instances,
with comparison to state-of-the-art baselines.
