Knowledge acquisition for building and integrating product configurators

Nowadays configuration systems are typically standalone systems not supporting supply chain integration of configurable products and services. The goal of the EU-funded project CAWICOMS is the development of an integration platform for such systems that supports a personalized, distributed configuration process. One of the key tasks of such a platform is the effective support of configuration knowledge acquisition and interchange, which is a prerequisite for enabling communication among configuration systems. In this paper we present the principles of the CAWICOMS Knowledge Acquisition Component which supports the design of configuration knowledge bases and the integration of heterogeneous knowledge bases using a configuration domain-specific language based on the Unified Modeling Language (UML), Configuration models represented in this language can be imported into the CAWICOMS environment and furthermore be integrated with configuration models stemming from other supplier configuration systems.