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Diagrammatic Acquisition of Functional Knowledge for Product Configuration Systems with the Unified Modeling Language

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Theory and Application of Diagrams (Diagrams 2000)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 1889))

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Abstract

Shorter product cycles, lower prices of products, and the production of goods that are tailored to the customers needs made knowledge based product configuration systems a great success of AI technology. However, configuration knowledge bases tend to become large and complex. Therefore, knowledge acquisition and maintenance are crucial phases in the life-cycle of a configuration system. We will show how to meet this challenge by extending a standard design language from the area of Software Engineering with classical description concepts for expressing configuration knowledge. We automatically translate this graphical depiction into logical sentences which can be exploited by a general inference engine to solve the configuration task. In order to cope with usability restrictions of diagrammatic notations for large applications, we introduce the usage of contextual diagrams. This mechanism makes the conceptual model more readable and understandable and supports intuitively the acquisition of functional configuration knowledge.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institut für Wirtschaftsinformatik und Anwendungssysteme, Universität Klagenfurt, A-9020, Austria

    Alexander Felfernig & Markus Zanker

Authors
  1. Alexander Felfernig
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  2. Markus Zanker
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Hartford, Dana Hall 230, 200 Bloomfield Avenue, West Hartford, Connecticut, 06117, USA

    Michael Anderson

  2. School of Psychology ESRC Centre for Research in Development, Instruction and Training, University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham, NG7 2RD, UK

    Peter Cheng

  3. Computer Science Department, University of Hamburg, Vogt-Koelln-Str. 30, 22527, Hamburg, Germany

    Volker Haarslev

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© 2000 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Felfernig, A., Zanker, M. (2000). Diagrammatic Acquisition of Functional Knowledge for Product Configuration Systems with the Unified Modeling Language. In: Anderson, M., Cheng, P., Haarslev, V. (eds) Theory and Application of Diagrams. Diagrams 2000. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 1889. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44590-0_31

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44590-0_31

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-67915-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-44590-6

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