If you have a building with hundreds of doors and thousands of keys, someone has to calculate which key opens which lock – and which doesn’t. Out of a simple matrix a highly complex plan for milling and pin positions is composed. People who are capable of doing that are called permutators. And there are only very few of them.
This posed a growing risk for a locking system manufacturer: the entire business depended on two specialists who were due to retire in the near future. If one of them dropped out, production would come to a standstill.
The solution: an AI model that automates this calculation process. I first analyzed the mathematical sub-problems to determine which process steps could be automated, with or without using AI. Then, various approaches were proposed to offer the customer the best cost-benefit ratio. The most sensible option was the one that automated 80% of the previous processing time.