Factory Product Lines: Tackling The Compatibility Problem

Variability poses enormous challenges to the manufacturing domain: the demand for highly customized and personalized goods requires bringing a large amount of flexibility to traditional mass production techniques. In particular, when a factory is asked to produce of a new variant of a good, production planning engineers need to manually examine that factory in question, in order to understand whether that new variant can indeed be produced. We call this the 'compatibility between the variant and the factory" problem. In this paper, we present a product line-based modelling technique and a tool for assisting production planning engineers in the resolution of this problem.