Knowledge-based Configuration for Configuring Combined Hardware/Software Systems

In this paper, we present a survey on research topics we consider with in the EU project ConIPF (Configuration of Industrial Product Families). The application domain which is considered in this project contains combined hardware/software systems. Those systems share a lot of commonalities and are configured in a rich variety of outcoming products. Besides others, we discuss issues concerning features and evolution. Feature trees describing the functionality in terms of customer requirements are used to efficiently select, combine and configure components from the product catalogue. Mappings between these feature models and the product descriptions have to be developed and modeled sufficiently for the configuration task. A further problem area arises in this application domain with evolution in both the products themselves and the models describing the product catalogue.