Unifying Product and Software Configuration

Research on computer-supported configuration of customizable products and services is currently carried out in two main communities: one community is mainly focused on the configuration of hardware artifacts, the other one is interested in configurable software systems and software product lines. Despite the significant overlap in research interests, the fields have mainly evolved in isolation in different fields such as Artificial Intelligence, Constraint Programming and Software Engineering. Yet, the communities have produced results that are applicable across the communities. The trend of products becoming increasingly heterogeneous, i. e., consisting of hardware, software and services, is furthermore increasingly blurring the line between the configuration domains in practice. This report documents the program and the outcomes of Dagstuhl Seminar 14172 “Unifying Product and Software Configuration”. The seminar gathered researchers and practitioners working on configuration problems. The seminar consisted of invited presentations and working group sessions covering various topics of software and product configuration including knowledge representation issues, automated reasoning and configuration management and had a particular focus on the industry perspective. Seminar April 21–24, 2014 – http://www.dagstuhl.de/14172 1998 ACM Subject Classification I.2.4 Knowledge Representation Formalisms and Methods, D.2.13 Reusable Software, F.4.1 Mathematical Logic, Logic and constraint programming