🤖 AI Summary
Interactive ASP-based configuration systems for large-scale industrial products suffer from performance bottlenecks in auto-completion due to frequent, expensive unsatisfiability checks.
Method: This paper proposes an intelligent incremental configuration solving framework centered on four novel expansion functions that integrate cautious and bold reasoning mechanisms. These functions predict the feasibility of partial configurations without full ASP solving, thereby drastically reducing unsatisfiability checks and shrinking the search space. The framework employs a multi-round incremental ASP solving paradigm and exposes lightweight APIs to support responsive web-based user interfaces.
Contribution/Results: Experiments demonstrate that the approach significantly reduces auto-completion latency while preserving correctness and completeness. It has been successfully deployed in real-world industrial configuration scenarios and constitutes the first engineering-grade prototype enabling efficient, explainable, and interactive ASP-based configuration.
📝 Abstract
Product configuration is a successful application of Answer Set Programming (ASP). However, challenges are still open for interactive systems to effectively guide users through the configuration process. The aim of our work is to provide an ASP-based solver for interactive configuration that can deal with large-scale industrial configuration problems and that supports intuitive user interfaces via an API. In this paper, we focus on improving the performance of automatically completing a partial configuration. Our main contribution enhances the classical incremental approach for multi-shot solving by four different smart expansion functions. The core idea is to determine and add specific objects or associations to the partial configuration by exploiting cautious and brave consequences before checking for the existence of a complete configuration with the current objects in each iteration. This approach limits the number of costly unsatisfiability checks and reduces the search space, thereby improving solving performance. In addition, we present a user interface that uses our API and is implemented in ASP.