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Developing a Declarative Rule Language for Applications in Product Configuration

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Practical Aspects of Declarative Languages (PADL 1999)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 1551))

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Abstract

A rule-based language is proposed for product configuration applications. It is equipped with a declarative semantics providing formal definitions for main concepts in product configuration, including configuration models, requirements and valid configurations. The semantics uses Horn clause derivability to guarantee that each element in a configuration has a justification. This leads to favorable computational properties. For example, the validity of a configuration can be decided in linear time and other computational tasks remain in NP. It is shown that CSP and dynamic CSP can be embedded in the proposed language which seems to be more suitable for representing configuration knowledge. The rule language is closely related to normal logic programs with the stable model semantics. This connection is exploited in the first implementation which is based on a translator from rules to normal programs and on an existing high performance implementation of the stable model semantics, the Smodels system.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. TAI Research Center and Lab. of Information Processing Science, Helsinki University of Technology, 9555, FIN-02015, HUT, Finland

    Timo Soininen

  2. Dept. of Computer Science and Eng., Laboratory for Theoretical Computer Science, Helsinki University of Technology, 5400, FIN-02015, HUT, Finland

    Ilkka Niemelä

Authors
  1. Timo Soininen
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  2. Ilkka Niemelä
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, New Mexico State University, Box 30001, New Science Hall (MS CS) Stewart Street, Las Cruces, NM, 88003, USA

    Gopal Gupta

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© 1998 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Soininen, T., Niemelä, I. (1998). Developing a Declarative Rule Language for Applications in Product Configuration. In: Gupta, G. (eds) Practical Aspects of Declarative Languages. PADL 1999. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1551. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-49201-1_21

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-49201-1_21

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-65527-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-49201-6

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