Product versioning and configuration management using 'Constraint Satisfaction Problem', (CSP)
by
Behrooz Arab
Department of Mechanical Engineering, K.N.Toosi University of Technology, Tehran, Iran
Coauthors: Dr. M. Kazerooni

In today’s competitive business world, customizable products have a superior situation. Due to the evolutionary nature of the design process, each product and its components may evolve through several versions. So, there will be a huge number of possible configurations for a complex product. But it is obvious that all versions of components or sub-configurations can’t construct consistent or relevant configurations. Therefore, existence of a comprehensive version and configuration management system for choosing and combining consistent versions of constituent objects is necessary. To constructing consistent configurations, all of the inter-dependency constraints have to be satisfied. This paper proposes a new approach enabling the designer to use relevant versions of constituent objects for constructing useful configurations. The problem can be formulated as a Constraint Satisfaction Problem, (CSP), that is a mathematical-based method. The necessary factors for CSPs formulation are constraints (functional, physical and topological constraints), variables (interface parameters of components) and the amplitude of variables. The designer must determine these factors and store them in the database. When a user tries to combine specific versions of components and construct a new configuration, the system automatically verifies these factors of selected versions in order to ensure consistency of the configuration.

Date received: April 28, 2008