From CSP to Configuration Problems

Contents

To increase market shares, industry needs to provide customized products, at a low price and low delivery time. But establishing a valid configuration is a complex, timeconsuming and costly task. There is a need for software tools to help people to model their products, and allow them to compute a valid configuration. The CSP framework seems to be a valuable candidate express models for configurable product and to solve the configuration problem. In this paper, we will show, on the basis of our experience in the field, that we need a richer model to capture the specificity of a configurable product and other functionalities to easily handle the resolution process. We will review some previous work fulfilling some of these functionalities and finally present an approach able to handle the whole problem.