Increased efficiency in customer involvement in configuration processes — The SWOP approach

Besides a higher complexity of products and services, trends and tendencies in nowadays industries show also a growing customer demand for reliable, fast and cheap as well as individual solutions for existing problems. Nevertheless, optimised engineering and production processes involving multidisciplinary input, dynamic working environments and multi-stakeholder interests across the life-cycle and supply chain of products and services still have not been achieved yet. Especially for complex products, the configuration process is getting more and more important for a successful and efficient sales process. In addition, it is essential for a company to store its technical know-how centrally but make it available cross-departmentally (Ulmer 2005). In the project SWOP, co-funded by the European Commission (STRP NMP2-CT-2005-016972), a new and extensible approach for an ICT-supported configuration of complex products is developed via the integrated combination of two state-of-the-art ICT technologies: □ Semantic Web technologies - for all necessary information modelled parametrically following a unified semantic modelling approach and □ Genetic Algorithms (GA) - for smart manipulation of semantic data towards optimised configuration of products.