An introduction to solving interactive configuration problems

Configuration problems emerged as a research topic in the late 1980s as the result of manufacturing shift from mass-production to mass-customization. The essential part of a configuration problem is assembling the parts that satisfy given specifications. Several theoretical frameworks have attempted to formalize this core notion and each of them have facilitated many diverse solution techniques for handling different application areas. In this paper we have concentrated on the increasingly important application area of interactive configuration which denotes a process of a user interactively specifying a product (a service). In particular, we explored the solution techniques using the frameworks of constraint satisfaction problems, binary decision diagrams and boolean satisfiability solving.