Conceptual Design for Configuration and Reconfiguration of Customizable Products

The development and maintenance of product configuration systems is faced with increasing challenges caused by the growing complexity of the underlying knowledge bases. Effective knowledge acquisition is needed since configurator development time is strictly limited, i.e. the product and the corresponding configuration system have to be developed in parallel. In this paper we show how to employ a standard design language (Unified Modeling Language UML) in order to represent the configuration knowledge on a conceptual level. The two constituent parts of the conceptual configuration model are the component model and a set of corresponding functional architectures defining which requirements can be imposed to the product. The conceptual configuration model is translated into an executable logic representation. Using this representation we show how to employ model-based diagnosis for diagnosing a faulty configuration knowledge base, infeasible requirements, and for reconfiguring old configurations.