Web-based solution to automate capability matchmaking for rapid system design and reconfiguration

Modern manufacturing companies desire rapid responsiveness from their production systems, in order to operate efficiently in highly dynamic environments. There is a need for design tools, which can support production system design and reconfiguration by providing automatic matchmaking between product requirements and resource capabilities. Such matchmaking is currently time consuming and heavily dependent upon designer’s experience. This paper introduces a prototype of a web-based software service, which carries out this matchmaking task automatically, and how it is designed to meet the requirements of manufacturing industry. Software engineering process has been followed for the development. We also describe a case example, which illustrates how the production system designer can interact with matchmaking activity through its web service interface. We expect that web service-based approach to matchmaking will reduce the technical barrier for adoption by the manufacturing industry as existing planning and reconfiguration systems can utilize the service with small efforts.