Motivation for the Book

Welcome to this book on configuration systems! The purpose of this book is to expose the reader to a field of Artificial Intelligence that has been successfully integrated and used in the industry for more than 30 years. This book provides configuration-related material for interested readers from the fields of industry, education, and research. 1.1 What Is Configuration? This part of the book starts with amotivation, takes a look at historical developments (Chapter 2), related technological issues (Chapter 3), and commercial benefits (Chapter 4). Chapter 5 provides an overview of the organization of the book. Mass Production. In the first part of the last century, Henry Ford introduced the T model (see Figure 1.1) and revolutionized the way cars were manufactured by introducing the concept of mass production, which is the efficient production of a high number of identical products. One of the best characterizations of mass production was given by Ford himself: You can have any car color as long as it’s black (remark about T model in 1909). Mass Customization. In the meantime, the mass production of identical products is a business model of the past since buyer markets predominate. This situation imposes new challenges on production and sales processes since companies are now forced to provide products that meet the individual needs of their customers. As a consequence, the mass customization paradigm (Anderson and Pine, 1996; Pine, 1999) has been established. This paradigm is based on the idea of the customer-individual production of highly variant products under near mass production pricing conditions. This means that the major goal was not only to perform a paradigm shift to more intensively take into account customer requirements and preferences but also to achieve this goal undermass production level time andpricing conditions. The era of mass customization ringed the bell for technological developments urgently needed to effectively implement the paradigm. Configuration technologies have evolved into a leading technology to support mass customization business scenarios. Knowledge-based Configuration. One definition of configuration (as an activity) has been given by Sabin and Weigel (1998), who define configuration as “a special case of design activity where the