This article studies practical challenges experienced by ICT (Information and Communication Technology) companies when managing product configuration under the circumstances of various customer requirements, different product portfolios, and extensive product complexity. The analysis from interview results concentrates on the prioritised issues and how to ensure effective product configuration ...

Product configuration systems are an emerging software technology that supports companies in deploying mass customization strategies. In this paper, we describe a CLP-based reasoning engine that we developed for a commercial configuration system. We first illustrate the advantages of the CLP approach to product configuration over other ones. Then, we describe the actual encoding of the consider...

In the Software Product Line approach, product configuration is a key activity in which stakeholders choose features for a product. This activity is critical in the sense that careless feature selections might lead to undesirable products. Even though product configuration is seen as a team activity in which divergent interests and views are merged into a single consistent product specification...

Product configuration is a successful application area of constraint programming. CLab [1, 2] is an open source C++ library for building fast backtrack-free interactive product configurators. It contains functions that support a two-phase approach to interactive product configuration described by Hadzic et al. [3]. In the first phase, a Binary Decision Diagram (BDD) representing the set of vali...

Many companies deploying mass customization strategies adopt product configuration systems to support their activities. While such systems focus mainly on configuration process support, mass customization needs to cover the management of the whole customizable product cycle. In this paper, we describe a graphical modeling framework that allows one to model both a product and its production proc...

Planning of an optimal product family architecture (PFA) plays a critical role in defining an organization's product platforms for product variant configuration while leveraging commonality and variety. The focus of PFA planning has been traditionally limited to the product design stage, yet with limited consideration of the downstream supply chain-related issues. Decisions of supply chain conf...

Long-term management of configurators has been identified as challenging and business-critical in previous work. Configuration knowledge and prices may change frequently due to product changes and business reasons. If sales rely on configuration support, prompt updates are important, even business-critical. This work reports challenges and practices of long-term management of a configurable B2C...

Developing a configurator requires a deep understanding of the configurable product. The configuration logic must encompass the way product components may be combined and customized, as well as how the integrity of a configuration can be verified. When products evolve over time, the configurator must be adapted accordingly. Product Managers are intimately familiar with the features and capabili...