Towards Industrial-scale Product Configuration

2025-03-26

AI Summary

The increasing diversity and complexity of product configuration requirements in mass customization pose significant challenges for evaluating and advancing configuration technologies. Method: This paper introduces COOM Suite—the first structured, scalable benchmarking framework for product configuration—built upon the COOM modeling language. It comprises a hierarchical product model benchmark suite featuring three representative configuration fragment types: foundational, combinatorial, and constraint-intensive. A bicycle serves as an illustrative pedagogical example, complemented by extensible industrial-scale models. We propose a novel fragment-wise evaluation paradigm that jointly optimizes expressive power and solving efficiency, enabling seamless integration of multi-paradigm Answer Set Programming (ASP) solvers. Contribution/Results: The open-source COOM Suite significantly enhances modeling consistency, solving reproducibility, and industrial standardization. It provides a verifiable, comparable, and extensible benchmark infrastructure to rigorously assess and advance configuration technologies.

Technology Category

• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Solvers and Tools
• Search and Optimization: Combinatorial Optimization
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Conceptual Inference and Reasoning

Application Category

• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: User model development and evaluation
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Cost models of using LLMs in production systems
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Efficient manipulation of static and dynamic Web-related graphs

Abstract

We address the challenge of product configuration in the context of increasing customer demand for diverse and complex products. We propose a solution through a curated selection of product model benchmarks formulated in the COOM language, divided into three fragments of increasing complexity. Each fragment is accompanied by a corresponding bike model example, and additional scalable product models are included in the COOM suite, along with relevant resources. We outline an ASP-based workflow for solving COOM-based configuration problems, highlighting its adaptability to different paradigms and alternative ASP solutions. The COOM Suite aims to provide a comprehensive, accessible, and representative set of examples that can serve as a common ground for stakeholders in the field of product configuration.

Problem

• Addressing product configuration for diverse customer demands
• Providing scalable product models in COOM language
• Developing ASP-based workflow for configuration solutions

Innovation

• COOM language for product model benchmarks
• ASP-based workflow for configuration problems
• Scalable product models in COOM suite