The CAWICOMS Project

This paper reports on the goals and first results of the CAWICOMS project. This EUfunded project has two main goals: The first one is providing technologies for the development of customer-adaptive Web-interfaces for the configuration of mass-customised products. The second one is the integration of configuration systems along the supplychain. Within this paper we first motivate the demand for personalised and adaptive Webinterfaces for the domain of product configuration. In addition, we sketch scenarios where product configuration takes place at several stages in the supply chain and the involved configuration systems have to co-operatively solve a distributed configuration task. An overview of the CAWICOMS architecture is given as well as first results on distributed problem solving and the integration into the surrounding enterprise's software infrastructure. 1 This work was partly funded by the EC under contract no. IST-1999-10688 (CAWICOMS) and the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Culture. CAWICOMS is the acronym for Customer-adaptive web interface for the configuration of products and services with multiple suppliers. 2 The CAWICOMS Project