Contextual Diagrams as Structuring Mechanisms for Designing Configuration Knowledge Bases in UML

Lower prices, shorter product cycles, and the customer individual production of highly variant products are the main reasons for the success of product configuration systems in various application domains (telecommunication industry, automotive industry, computer industry). In this paper we show how to employ UML in order to design complex configuration knowledge bases. We introduce the notion of contextual diagrams in order to cope with the intrinsic complexity of configuration knowledge. Since domain experts mostly think in terms of contexts, this approach leads to a more intuitive way of modeling configuration knowledge.