ECAI 2006 Workshop on Configuration

Description

Representing and solving configuration problems have always been subjects of interest for applying and developing AI techniques. Powerful knowledge-representation formalisms are necessary to capture the great variety and complexity of configurable product models. Furthermore, efficient reasoning methods are required to provide intelligent interactive behaviour in configurator software, such as solution search, satisfaction of user preferences, personalization, optimization, diagnosis, etc.

Nowadays, different AI approaches are well-established as central technologies in many industrial configuration systems. This wide-spread industrial use of AI-based configurators makes the field more challenging than ever: the complexity of configurable products still increases, the mass-customization paradigm is extended to fields like service and software configuration, personalized (web-based) user interaction and user preference elicitation are of increasing importance, and finally, the integration of configurators into surrounding IT infrastructures like business information systems or web applications becomes a critical issue.

The main goal of the workshop is to promote high-quality research in all technical areas related to configuration. As such, the workshop is of interest for researchers working in the various fields within the wide range of applicable AI technologies (e.g. Constraint Programming, Description Logics, Non-monotonic Reasoning, Case-Based Reasoning ...). It serves as a platform for researchers and industrial participants to exchange needs, ideas, benchmarks, use cases etc. Collocated with ECAI 2006 the Workshop on Configuration provides an ideal forum to attract high-quality submissions.

The workshop continues the series of seven successful Configuration Workshops started at the AAAI96 Fall Symposium and continued on IJCAI, AAAI, and ECAI since 1999. Beside the participation of researchers from a variety of different fields, past events always attracted significant industrial interest from major configurator vendors like ILOG, Oracle, or SAP, as well as from end-users like ABB, DaimlerChrysler, HP, or Siemens.

Driven by the strong industrial interest, the proposed workshop shall include an invited talk on current configuration technology, problem-solving approaches, and basic terminology before the technical sessions in order to provide a solid common ground for discussions and exchange of ideas between academia and industrial participants.

Furthermore, we invite tool vendors to submit position statements describing current problems, new challenges, experiences, or new application fields and use cases, that will be presented and discussed in a separate session and panel.

Finally, in order to attract high-quality technical papers, we will publish short versions of selected workshop papers in a special feature (department) of the January/February 2007 issue of "IEEE Intelligent Systems".