Constraint Based Planning of Interiour Furnishings

When dealing with interiour planning tasks one has to consider a broad range of different variants and styles that match dependent on geometrical properties and related constraints. The selection of appropriate components from a large database containing a variety of different product ranges without interfering with a single constraint is a challenging task. Nowadays, there exists a number of software tools that aim on support for this kind of problem. Unfortunately, these tools are often difficult to use, which makes them inappropriate to the average user who wants just to plan his or her living room. Moreover, due to the fact that there are a lot of product dependent constraints to be considered, such tools are often specifically tailored to a certain class of interiour components. The difficult expression of such component constraints leeds in general to a direct implementation rather than a flexible formal specification. As a result it is nearly impossible to adapt such planning tools to new component databases without having to rewrite the application’s code. This work focuses on concepts to overcome this problem. We present two approaches to specify planning constraints in a formal way that provides flexibility in that we only have to change the description when changing the component database.