Creating a documentation system to support the development and maintenance of product configuration systems

  • Authors:
  • Anders Haug;Anders Degn;Bjarne Poulsen;Lars Hvam

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, Technical University of Denmark, Lyngby;Department of Informatics and Mathematical Modelling, Technical University of Denmark, Lyngby;Department of Informatics and Mathematical Modelling, Technical University of Denmark, Lyngby;Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, Technical University of Denmark, Lyngby

  • Venue:
  • CEA'07 Proceedings of the 2007 annual Conference on International Conference on Computer Engineering and Applications
  • Year:
  • 2007

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

A product configuration system (PCS) can be defined as a product-oriented expert system that allows users to specify a product while restricting how different elements and properties may be combined. The use of configuration technology has in several cases led to improvements of product specification processes, such as shorter lead times, reductions of resources needed, and fewer errors. A procedure for building product configuration systems from the Centre for Product Modelling at the Technical University of Denmark has been applied in projects for more than ten years. The CPM-procedure includes three main modelling techniques to support the development and maintenance of PCSs. However, no software, which supports all three techniques in an integrated fashion, currently exists. This means that when developing PCSs based on the CPM-procedure there is no automatic integration between the created models, wherefore some information has to be transferred between models manually. CPM has, therefore, for some years worked on creating a basis for developing a documentation system that supports the development and maintenance of PCSs. Research focusing on the requirements for a documentation system has been produced, and more recently detailed definitions of the included modelling techniques have emerged. This paper describes how these definitions have been converted into a software prototype and what have been learned from the evaluation of the prototype.