Case-based support to small-medium enterprises: The Symphony project

This paper presents Symphony, an IMS (Intelligent Manufacturing System) developed in the context of an interregional project supported by the European Commission. Symphony was a three year project that aimed at the development of an integrated set of tools for management of enterprizes, in order facilitate the continuous creation, exploration and exploitation of business opportunities through strategic networking. In particular, Symphony is devoted to support human resource managers of Small-Medium Enterprises in their decision making process about the looking for newcomers and/or assigning people to jobs. About this topic, the paper focuses on SymMemory, a case-based module of the main system that has been developed to identify what features are necessary to evaluate a person, aggregate them into a suitable case-structure representing a person or job profile and comparing profiles according to a specific similarity algorithm.