Automatic Capability Matchmaking for Re-configurable Robotics Platform

The aim of this Experiment is to demonstrate a new decision support tool to aid the manufacturing system designer and reconfiguration planner during greenfield and brownfield design scenarios. Designing a manufacturing environment (workstation, cell, line) is challenging, multi-faceted, and time-consuming task for a human.

Currently, designers find feasible resource solutions by comparing the characteristics of the product to the technical properties of the available resources by browsing through online or paper catalogues to select thousands of components manually. A lot of time and knowledge is needed to browse and find components fulfilling the required manufacturing processes from these various catalogues. Yet another question is to integrate the found resources all together so that the system can be connected and will play along. The proposed AI solution improves situation by finding feasible resource combinations out of a large set of available resources and proposes these solutions for the designer. The designer can then focus on comparing only feasible and working solution alternatives together, and to select and configure the final system solution out of them. The experimented capability matchmaking system is expected to help the system designer or reconfiguration planner to find and utilize resources and resource combinations that are out of his/her previous solution space, thus leading to more innovative system solutions. Using new computer-aided intelligent planning methods and tools, the time and effort put into system design can be reduced drastically.