Knowledge Engineering for Configuration Systems

TLDR: Developing a product configuration system is a nontrivial and challenging task for various reasons because the business rules or technical constraints that define the space of possible configurations can be relatively complex and also subject to frequent changes.

Abstract: Developing a product configuration system is a nontrivial and challenging task for various reasons. First, the domain knowledge that has to be encoded into the system is often spread over several departments or functions within a company. Besides that, in many cases data from existing information systems have to be integrated into the configurator. Finally, the business rules or technical constraints that define the space of possible configurations can be relatively complex and also subject to frequent changes. This makes acquiring and encoding domain knowledge as well as testing and debugging particularly demanding tasks.