JUCS - Journal of Universal Computer Science 26(3): 343-373, doi: 10.3897/jucs.2020.019
Solver Requirements for Interactive Configuration
Andreas Falkner‡, Alois Haselböck‡, Gerfried Krames‡, Gottfried Schenner‡, Herwig Schreiner‡, Richard Taupe‡‡ Corporate Technology, Siemens AG Österreich, Vienna, Austria
Corresponding author: Andreas Falkner ( andreas.a.falkner@siemens.com ) © Andreas Falkner, Alois Haselböck, Gerfried Krames, Gottfried Schenner, Herwig Schreiner, Richard Taupe. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY-ND 4.0). This license allows reusers to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, and only so long as attribution is given to the creator. The license allows for commercial use. Citation:
Falkner A, Haselböck A, Krames G, Schenner G, Schreiner H, Taupe R (2020) Solver Requirements for Interactive Configuration. JUCS - Journal of Universal Computer Science 26(3): 343-373. https://doi.org/10.3897/jucs.2020.019 |  |
Abstract
Interactive configuration includes the user as an essential factor in the configuration process. The two main components of an interactive configurator are a user interface at the front-end and a knowledge representation and reasoning (KRR) framework at the back-end. In this paper we discuss important requirements for the underlying KRR system to support an interactive configuration process. Representative of many reasoning systems and tools used for implementing product configurators, we selected MiniZinc, Choco, Potassco, Picat, CP-SAT solver, and Z3 for evaluation and reviewed them against the identified requirements. We observe that many of those requirements are not well supported by existing stand-alone solvers.
Keywords
interactive configuration, product configuration, constraint programming, knowledge representation and reasoning, user interface