A Practical Tool for Mass-customising Configurable Products

Configurable products are an important way to achieve mass-customisation to satisfy individual customer requirements. We describe a novel configurator prototype that supports tailoring, i.e. configuring, such a product. It contains a semi-visual modelling tool based on a high-level objectand product structure-oriented modelling language with a clear formal semantics. The main functionality is delivered by a configuration support tool aimed at e-commerce. This tool provides intelligent support for configuring a product by applying a state-of-the-art inference engine for the form of logic programs on which the formal semantics is based. The user interface of the tool is generated almost automatically. We have modelled four real products from two domains and tested the efficiency of the inference engine on them. For this, we use a modelling-language-independent method for systematic testing. For these products, the modelling language is suitable and the inference engine efficient enough for practical use.