Semantic rules for capability matchmaking in the context of manufacturing system design and reconfiguration

To survive in dynamic markets and meet the changing requirements, manufacturing companies must rapidly design new production systems and reconfigure existing ones. The current designer-centric search of feasible resources from various catalogues is a time-consuming and laborious process, which limits the consideration of many different alternative resource solutions. This article presents the implementation of an automatic capability matchmaking approach and software, which searches through resource catalogues to find feasible resources and resource combinations for the processing requirements of the product. The approach is based on formal ontology-based descriptions of both products and resources and the semantic rules used to find the matches. The article focuses on these rules implemented with SPIN rule language. They relate to 1) inferring and asserting parameters of combined capabilities of combined resources and 2) comparison of the product characteristics against the capability parameters of the resource (combination). The presented case study proves that the matchmaking system can find feasible matches. However, a human designer must validate the result when making the final resource selection. The approach should speed up the system design and reconfiguration planning and allow more alternative solutions be considered, compared with traditional manual design approaches.