Towards distributed configuration

Abstract

Shorter product cycles, lower prices, and the production of highly variant products tailored to the customer needs are the main reasons for the proceeding success of product configuration systems. However, today’s product configuration systems are designed for solving local configuration tasks only, although the economic development towards webs of highly specialized solution providers demands for distributed problem solving functionality. In this paper we motivate the integration of several configurators and give a formal definition of the distributed configuration task based on a logic theory of configuration. Furthermore, we present a basic architecture comprising several configuration agents and propose an algorithm for cooperation between distributed configuration systems that ensures correctness and completeness of configuration results.