TABLE OF CONTENTS To improve competitiveness, companies try to launch products with customisation capabilities. They therefore include configuration software ( configurator) in their information systems. In consequence, most of the ERP providers include in their software packages configuration modules (see the surveys of (Sabin et al 1998)). In order to function, these configuration modules require a generic model of the product, which is not normally defined by a computer science specialist. Therefore, there is a strong need for friendly generic modelling approaches and relevant tools in order to set up configurators in industry.
Many papers dealing with configuration are more concerned with a solutions approach and the relevant generic modelling problem is normally not addressed. As Wielinga explains in (Wielinga et al 1997)
" Many authors prefer a parsimonious set of knowledge structures that suit their favourite problem solving method or their domain".
Oriented towards configuration requirements and modelling, our contribution targets two goals. The first, dealing mainly with product generic modelling requirements, is to identify and to classify the product customisation possibilities that should be fulfilled by configurators. The second, dealing with modelling, is to analyse how the constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) framework can handle these modelling requirements and to comment how existing algorithms can assist the configuration process.
We first recall configuration basic definitions,...
