Towards Hybrid Techniques for Efficient Declarative Configuration

During the last decades configuration has been extensively employed in a wide range of application domains, implemented by a multitude of techniques like logics, procedural, object-oriented, or resourced-driven approaches. Especially declarative methods provide the foundation for precise and well-understood semantics for reasoning tasks and allow for a succinct representation of the underlying knowledge base. However, a drawback in using such powerful declarative techniques lies in their computational complexity. In this paper we present a simple declarative framework for configuration in Prolog in order to show the advantages of logicbased techniques but also to identify some challenges for such formalisms. We argue for hybrid systems which combine and utilize efficient techniques from different configuration methodologies under a unified declarative interface.