Configuration

Author
M. Stumptner
Editorial
E0001 (2000)
Citation
Papers from the Workshop at ECAI 2000, 14th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 21-22 August 2000, Berlin, Deutschland, 2000.
Resources
BibTeX

Abstract

Organizing Committee
Program Committee
Table of Contents
Preface

Demo Descriptions

Acknowledgement: Final document preparation by Margit Rudelstorfer.

The ECAI 2000 Workshop on Configuration is the third in a series of international meetings on configuration that began with the 1996 AAAI Fall Symposium in Boston, USA, and continued with the AAAI'99 Configuration Workshop in Orlando, USA.

Configuration tasks can be defined as the design of an individual product using a set of pre-defined components or component types while taking into account a set of well-defined restrictions on how the components can be combined. This task can be supported by applying a wide range of AI techniques such as rule-based systems, constraint satisfaction and its extensions, description logics, logic programs, and different specialized problem solving methods.

Among the original application areas of the early expert systems, Configuration research has a long history, but has recently attracted a lot of research and industrial interest. The research interest is witnessed by the high turnout to events such as the AAAI'99 Workshop on Configuration. The industrial interest is indicated by the increasing number of vendors of software tools for configuration, i.e. configurators. The importance of configuration has expanded as more companies use configurators to efficiently customize their products for individual customers, and especially with the trend towards providing configuration support to the customers themselves (whether corporate or individual) via the Web.

However, efficient development and maintenance of configurators require sophisticated software development techniques. AI methods, more than ever, are central to developing powerful configuration tools and to extending the functionality of configurators. Configuration problems, like planning problems, can be seen on one hand as an interesting test-bed for novel AI techniques. On the other hand, configuration problems can serve as input for new research directions. The seventeen papers included in these pages, dealing with topics such as modeling, efficient algorithms, testify to the relevance and technical challenge presented by configuration problems.

The Organizers