Abstract
Lower prices, shorter product cycles, and the customer individual production of highly variant products are the main reasons for the success of product configuration systems in various application domains (telecommunication industry, automotive industry, computer industry). In this paper we show how to employ UML in order to design complex configuration knowledge bases. We introduce the notion of contextual diagrams in order to cope with the intrinsic complexity of configuration knowledge. Since domain experts mostly think in terms of contexts, this approach leads to a more intuitive way of modeling configuration knowledge.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
V.E. Barker, D.E. O’Connor, J.D. Bachant, and E. Soloway. Expert systems for configuration at Digital: XCON and beyond. Communications of the ACM, 32, 3:298–318, 1989.
R.H. Bourdeau and B.H.C. Cheng. A formal Semantics for Object Model Diagrams. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 21,10:799–821, 1995.
Charles Charlton and Ken Wallace. Reminding and context in design. In Proceedings 6th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Design (AID’00), pages 569–588, Boston/Worcester, MA, USA, 2000. Kluwer Academic Publishers.
N.M. Delisle and M.D. Schwartz. Contexts — a partitioning concept for hypertext. ACM Transactions on Information Systems, 5,2:168–186, 1987.
A. Evans. Reasoning with UML class diagrams. In Proceedings Workshop on Industrial Strength Formal Methods(WIFT’98), Florida, USA, 1998. IEEE Press.
A. Evans and S. Kent. Core Meta-Modeling Semantics of UML: the pUML aproach. In Proceedings ¡¡UML¿¿’99, pages 140–155, Fort Collings, Colorado, USA, 1999.
F. Feldkamp, M. Heinrich, and K.D. Meyer Gramann. SyDeR System Development For Reusability. AIEDAM, Special Issue: Configuration Design, 12,4:373–382, 1998.
A. Felfernig, G. Friedrich, and D. Jannach. UML as domain specific language for the construction of knowledge-based configuration systems. In 11th International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering, pages 337–345, Kaiserslautern, Germany, 1999.
A. Felfernig, G. Friedrich, and D. Jannach. Generating product configuration knowledge bases from precise domain extended UML models. In Proc. 12th International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering, pages 284–293, Chicago, USA, 2000.
A. Felfernig, G. Friedrich, D. Jannach, and M. Stumptner. An Integrated Development Environment for the Design and Maintenance of Large Configuration Knowledge Bases. Artificial Intelligence in Design (AID’00) (to appear), Kluwer Academic Publisher, 2000.
G. Friedrich and M. Stumptner. Consistency-Based Configuration. In AAAI Workshop on Configuration, Technical Report WS-99-05, pages 35–40, Orlando, Florida, 1999.
J. Gil, J. Howse, and S. Kent. Constraint Diagrams: A Step Beyond UML. In Proceedings TOOLS USA’99. IEEE Press, 1999.
M. Lowry, A. Philpot, T. Pressburger, and I. Underwood. A formal approach to domain-oriented software design environments. In Proc. 9th Knowledge-Based Software Engineering Conference, pages 48–57, Montery, CA, USA, 1994. IEEE Computer Society.
D. Mailharro. A classification and constraint-based framework for configuration. AIEDAM, Special Issue: Configuration Design, 12,4:383–397, 1998.
J. McCarthy. Notes on formalizing context. In Proc. of the 13th IJCAI, pages 555–560, Chambery, France, 1993.
S. Mittal and F. Frayman. Towards a Generic Model of Configuration Tasks. In Proc. of the 11th IJCAI, pages 1395–1401, Detroit, MI, 1989.
H. Peltonen, T. Mnnist, T. Soininen, J. Tiihonen, A. Martio, and R. Sulonen. Concepts for Modeling Configurable Products. In Proceedings of European Conference Product Data Technology Days, pages 189–196, Sandhurst, UK, 1998.
B.J. PineII, B. Victor, and A.C. Boynton. Making Mass Customization Work. Harvard Business Review, Sep./Oct. 1993:109–119, 1993.
J. Rumbaugh, M. Blaha, W. Premerlani, F. Eddy, and W. Lorensen. Object-Oriented Modeling and Design. In Prentice Hall International Editions, New Jersey, USA, 1991.
J. Rumbaugh, I. Jacobson, and G. Booch. The Unified Modeling Language Reference Manual. Addison-Wesley, 1998.
M. Siegel, E. Sciore, and S. Salveter. A method for automatic rule derivation to support semantic query optimization. ACM Transactions on Database Systems, 17:563–600, 1992.
T. Soininen, J. Tiihonen, T. Mnnist, and R. Sulonen. Towards a General Ontology of Configuration. AIEDAM, Special Issue: Configuration Design, 12,4:357–372, 1998.
M. Stumptner. An overview of knowledge-based configuration. AI Communications, 10(2), June, 1997.
M. Stumptner, G. Friedrich, and A. Haselbck. Generative constraint-based configuration of large technical systems. AIEDAM, Special Issue: Configuration Design, 12, 4:307–320, Sep. 1998.
Manos Theodorakis, Anastasia Analyti, Panos Constantopoulos, and Nikos Spyratos. Context in information bases. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Cooperative Information Systems (CoopIS’98), pages 260–270, New York City, NY, USA, August 1998. IEEE Computer Society.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2000 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Felfernig, A., Jannach, D., Zanker, M. (2000). Contextual Diagrams as Structuring Mechanisms for Designing Configuration Knowledge Bases in UML. In: Evans, A., Kent, S., Selic, B. (eds) ≪UML≫ 2000 — The Unified Modeling Language. UML 2000. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1939. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-40011-7_17
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-40011-7_17
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-41133-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-40011-0
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive