Knowledge-Based Configuration

Foreword

Industrialization brought us the ability to efficiently produce the same products. However, some types of businesses are not well served by delivering the same product to all customers. Manufacturers try to address this problem by creating a fixed set of product variants that contain a predefined set of options in the hope that one of these variants might suit customer needs. Unfortunately, for highly variant products, this strategy does not provide a suitably close match to satisfy individual customer needs. To allow for individual customization, configuration systems first were applied to complex industrial products such as trucks and high-end computer systems. International Harvester in the 1960s implemented in Assembly language ...