Software product configurators are an emerging technology that supports companies in deploying mass customization strategies. Such strategies need to cover the management of the whole customizable product cycle. Adding process modeling and configuration features to a product configurator may improve its ability to assist mass customization development. In this paper, we describe a modeling fram...

Product configuration software tools are commonly available as stand-alone products or as part of standard enterprise software. The application of product configurators generally addresses three goals: Product configuration tools support sales activities, they support different tasks of process planning, e.g. automated generation of Bills Of Material and they preserve engineering knowledge by s...

Like source code, architectures change. The use of product line architectures provides a particularly rich source of changes: new products are introduced, existing products are enhanced and modified, and old products are retired. Methods exist that record these kinds of changes by maintaining explicit representations of the evolution of a product line architecture. Despite the availability of s...

Systematic reuse of software artifacts can be achieved with software product lines, which represent a family of similar software systems. A variability model, e.g., feature model, describes their commonalities and variabilities and serves as a basis for a product configuration, i.e., the selection of features according to constraints defined in the model. These variability models can contain ad...

In an e-business world, configuration processes are becoming increasingly distributed. Collecting product information to process it in a centralized configuration system is only feasible in some domains. This short paper argues that in telecommunications, a distributed configuration transaction-oriented process is required. After the theorectical arguments, a particular service management syste...

During product configuration one of the main challenges is to understand the available options and the consequences of decisions, e.g., in terms of functionality (features) and other characteristics (attributes) of the product. In this paper, we aim to provide support for understanding consequences of configuration decisions, focussing in particular on numerical product attributes resulting fro...

Product configurators are widely used to generate products out of the vast amount of potential variants in product families. This is a complex task that is hampered by the fact that configuration models are abstractions of the real world and cannot contain all dependencies between the artifacts and the environment. For embedded systems this is crucial because calibration is used to adjust the p...

Product configuration system, being a knowledge intensive system, plays an important role in order to realize Mass Customization. The Platformbased generic product configuration tool(PB-GPCT) being developed by Institute of Design for Innovation, Hebei University of Technology. PB-GPCT is a structure-based and domain independent configuration tool. For the realization of PB-GPCT, UML is chosen ...

Shortened product life cycles and globalization have induced dynamism and uncertainty into world markets. Hence manufacturing enterprises (MEs) can gain competitive advantage from being reconfigurable. But appropriate application of agile and lean Manufacturing philosophies must complement the application of reconfiguration techniques. However, choosing and applying the best philosophies and te...

Shorter product cycles, lower prices, and the production of highly variant products tailored to the customer needs are the main reasons for the proceeding success of product configuration systems. However, today’s product configuration systems are designed for solving local configuration tasks only, although the economic development towards webs of highly specialized solution providers demands ...