UML as domain specific language for the construction of knowledge-based configuration systems

In many domains, software development has to meet the challenges of developing highly adaptable software very rapidly. In order to accomplish this task, domain specific, formal description languages and knowledge-based systems are employed. From the viewpoint of the industrial software development process, it is important to integrate the construction and maintenance of these systems into standard software engineering processes. In addition, the descriptions should be comprehensible for the domain experts in order to facilitate the review process. For the realization of product configuration systems, we show how these requirements can be met by using a standard design language (UML-Unified Modeling Language) as notation in order to simplify the construction of a logic-based description of the domain knowledge. We show how classical description concepts for expressing configuration knowledge can be introduced into UML and be translated into logical sentences automatically. These sentences are exploited by a general inference engine solving the configuration task.