Patching process optimization in an agent-controlled timber mill

Repair and patching of wood defects is a costly process of inline production in timber industry. A large variety of plain as well as laminated wooden products demands for offline human interaction and skilled handcrafting in order to achieve the desired quality of the final products. The EU FP7 project Hol-I-Wood PR demonstrates the transformation of a traditional wood patching line for shuttering panels into a fully automated, flexible patching plant. The focus of this paper is set on the optimization of the different production steps of a patching robot, which comprises optimal patch placement, path planning and trajectory generation. Based on this, the processing time of each workpiece can be accurately estimated. These computations serve as an input for advanced panel scheduling, which assigns panels to one of several identical parallel patching lines in a throughput-optimal manner. In order to ensure high modularity of the components and scalability for various wood mills, an agent-based approach was chosen for the implementation of the automation system.