Compatibility and coalition formation: Towards the vision of an automatic synthesis of manufacturing system designs

The increasing demand for manufacturing systems´ flexibility and adaptability enlarges the complexity in engineering. Engineering efficiency must be increased by reusing existing components. However, large component libraries complicate a modular approach as identifying and selecting components can be time consuming and inefficient. To overcome this challenge, the vision of an automatic synthesis of manufacturing system designs is illustrated. It is shown how this vision can be mapped to checking the compatibility of components from a library and how coalition formation of software agents can provide possible means towards realizing this vision.