A tool for developing interactive configuration applications

Abstract

Knowledge-based techniques have been proven to be well suited for configuration tasks and several, often successful, systems have been developed. The goal of these knowledge-based techniques has in general been to produce “black box” configuration systems, i.e., batch-mode systems that take a set of requirements as input and produce configurations as output. This has resulted in rather complex systems that have been time-consuming to develop and in which the choices of components, which are often subjective, are hidden from the user. In this paper we present a less complex and more interactive approach to configuration that we label interactive configuration by selection (ICS). The idea is that a configuration system could be more of a tool, assisting in the task of configuration, than a “black box” automatically producing configurations directly from requirements. To support the approach we have developed OBELICS. OBELICS is a prototype of a tool, implemented in SICStus Objects, that integrates both a problem-solving method for ICS and a tool for domain knowledge modeling. With OBELICS we hope to demonstrate that such a tool can make it feasible and profitable to develop configuration applications, even for small scale applications.