Customer-Adaptive and Distributed Online Product Configuration in the CAWICOMS Project

This paper reports on the goals and first results of the CAWICOMS project. This EU-funded project has two main goals: The first one is providing technologies for the development of customeradaptive Web-interfaces for the configuration of masscustomized products. The second one is the integration of configuration systems along the supplychain. Within this paper we first motivate the demand for personalized and adaptive Web-interfaces 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 cooperatively 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.