A TOOL FOR DEVELOPING INTERACTIVE CONFIGURATION APPLICATIONS

Knowledge-based techniques have been proven to be well suited for conf iguration tasks and several, often successful, systems have been devel oped. The goal of these knowledge-based techniques has in general been to produce ''black box'' configuration systems, i.e., batch-mode syst ems that take a set of requirements as input and produce configuration s as output. This has resulted in rather complex systems that have bee n time-consuming to develop and in which the choices of components, wh ich are often subjective, are hidden from the user. In this paper we p resent a less complex and more interactive approach to configuration t hat we label interactive configuration by selection (ICS). The idea is that a configuration system could be more of a tool, assisting in the task of configuration, than a ''black box'' automatically producing c onfigurations directly from requirements. To support the approach we h ave developed OBELICS. OBELICS is a prototype of a tool, implemented i n SICStus Objects, that integrates both a problem-solving method for I CS and a tool for domain knowledge modeling. With OBELICS we hope to d emonstrate that such a tool can make it feasible and profitable to dev elop configuration applications, even for small scale applications.