Intelligent support for interactive configuration of mass-customized products

Abstract

Mass customization of configurable products made knowledge-based (and web-based) product configuration systems an important tool to support the sales engineer or end user when Configuring systems according to the customer’s needs. Configuration problems are often modeled as Constraint Satisfaction Problems, where the configuration process is an interactive search process. During this search process, the user may encounter situations, where a path in the search tree is reached, where no solution can be found. In this paper we show how model-based diagnosis techniques can be employed to assist the user to recover from such situations by calculating adequate (or optimal) reconfiguration or recovery actions.