Intelligente Produktkonfiguratoren als Voraussetzung für maßgeschneiderte Massenprodukte

The production of products with many variants imposes new requirements on business processes in connection with sales, distribution, and logistics. Configuration systems can support these processes in an efficient way. The rapid development of these systems is a prerequisite for a successful deployment within the organizational context. Configurable products have complex product structures and there are dependencies between components, which have to be modeled and maintained during the development and deployment of the system. Additionally, configuration systems have to be integrated into the existing software-infrastructure of the organization. This paper shows an architecture for configuration systems addressing the requirements mentioned above. The development of the system is supported by a graphical modeling language allowing for a simple knowledge representation. The interactive configuration procedure is enhanced through a graphical interface, which can be partly generated from the specification. The presented architecture allows for decreased development time and costs and increased maintainability for configuration systems.