The automated design of production systems is a young field of research which has not been widely explored by industry nor research in recent decades. Currently, the effort spent in production system design is increasing significantly in automotive industry due to the number of product variants and product complexity. Intelligent methods can support engineers in repetitive tasks and give them more opportunity to focus on work which requires their core competencies. This paper presents a novel artificial intelligence methodology that automatically generates initial production system configurations based on real industrial scenarios in the automotive field of body-in-white production. The hybrid methodology reacts flexibly against data sets of different content and has been implemented in a software prototype
