Declarative Specifications for Pharmaceutical Robotics Systems
Today, the automation of pharmaceutical labs has become increasingly important due to more complex drug discovery techniques. While it substantially improves the drug discovery process, most robotics systems still require manual tuning by a pharmaceutical researcher. These robotics systems contain a controller, which manages workflow by using a simple procedural programming language and a simple scheduler. At ReTiSoft we believe that these robotics systems should be seamlessly modified to accept declarative specifications from a pharmaceutical researcher, in particular, the robotics systems should only be notified about the microplate processing time at each station. In this paper, we will describe the limitations of current pharmaceutical robotics systems. Then, we will define a computational model of the problem, and introduce the architectural design of our “declarative” robotics system simulator. Finally, Section 4 outlines the inherent benefits of our research.