More and more enterprises use Internet and WWW to improve their contacts to customers and to enhance customer relationships. The link between e-commerce and customer relationship management is well-known and is discussed in different publications (e.g. Hagel/Armstrong 1996, Shaw 1999, etc.). But Internet and WWW can offer even more: It can be an enabler for new and innovative business strategie...

The ever-increasing complexity and diversity of consumer products drives the creation of product families (products with many commonalties and few differences) and product populations (products with many commonalties but also with many differences). For the latter, we use an approach based on composition of software components, organized in packages. This influences our configuration management...

Mass customization research explores the design and production of individualized products at mass product costs. Model-based configuration systems allow the customer to configure an individualized product. With increasing product and configuration complexity, ways of simplifying configuration for the customer are required. This paper discusses some principles of model-based configuration and in...

Software Configuration Management (SCM) is now recognized by the Software Engineering world as important aspect of software development especially for large and complex software systems. It has also become a vital part of the most widely used software process improvement frameworks. Software Product Line is a new phenomenon that has gained considerable attention during the last decade as an eff...

Constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) paradigm has proven highly successful in product configuration, particularly for build-to-order products, by assigning component types to all components without violating any constraints. For engineer-to-order products, however, product configuration requires assigning design parameters to each component as well. Hence, it often involves numeric variables, ...

To compete in the global marketplace, manufacturers try to differentiate their products by focusing on individual customer needs. Fulfilling this goal requires that companies shift frommass production to mass customization. Under this approach, a generic architecture, named product platform, is designed to support the derivation of customized products through a configuration process that determ...

Product configuration provides an important opportunity for taking advantage of a number of the benefits of mass customization. Mass customization is aimed at developing a wide external variety of products to satisfy individual customers, with managed internal diversity to prevent cost proliferation. In this context, we propose an iterative product configuration method applying fuzzy logic whic...

Product configuration systems play an important role in the development of Mass Customisation. The configuration of complex product families may nowadays involve multiple design disciplines, e.g. hardware, software and services. In this paper, we present a conceptual approach for modelling the variability in such heterogeneous product families. Our approach is based on a framework that aims to ...

Purpose – Product configurator is a sales and production-planning tool that helps to transform customer requirements into bills-of-materials, lists of features and cost estimations. The purpose of this paper is to introduce a method of how to analyse sales configuration models by using a design structure matrix (DSM) tool. By applying the DSM techniques, the sales configuration managers may seq...

For more than 30 years, knowledge-based product configuration systems have been successfully applied in many industrial domains. Correspondingly, a large number of advanced techniques and algorithms have been developed in academia and industry to support different aspects of configuration reasoning. While traditional research in the field focused on the configuration of physical artefacts, reco...