Semantic Modeling and Extraction for Cross-family Product Configuration

In today´s global marketplace, customers´ demand for personalized product has become a trend. This results in an increasing demand for manufacturers to produce more product variants. Product configurator as an integral part of manufacturing services system plays an important role in generating and managing product variants. In order for product configurator to generate as much variety as possible for the market with as little variety as possible in between products, we introduce a cross family product configuration concept for generating more product variants on-the-fly without designing a new product family. A constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) approach is adopted to model the configuration problem. We define a novel way of semantic modeling to capture the configuration knowledge for a product family, including product family composition information, configuration constraints and their mapping relationship. Based on the model, a semantics extraction algorithm is proposed to extract useful semantics from existing product family knowledge for cross family product configuration. The significance of the model and extraction approach is demonstrated.