Solving the Personal Computer Configuration Problems as Discrete Optimization Problems: A Preliminary Report

Abstract

Configuring personal computers (PCs) in a careful manner definitely represent difficult decision problems in which given the diversity of hardware components possible for each PC nowadays, and the limited compatibility between some hardware components, we are interested to obtain an (sub-)optimal configuration for each specific usage restricted to a budget limit and other possible criteria. In this paper, we firstly gave a formal definition of these PC configuration problems as discrete optimization problems. More importantly, we proposed a systematic and flexible framework for solving these difficult real-world discrete optimization problems. The major advantage of our proposed framework is that users can flexibly add in or modify their specific requirements at any time. To demonstrate the feasibility of our proposal, we built a prototype of an intelligent Personal Computer Configuration Advisor available on the Web to assist the general users in configuring their own PCs. Interestingly, our work opens up many new directions for future investigation including the improvement of our optimizer to handle more complicated users’ requirements and the integration of other optimizers like the branch-and-bound method for comparison.