Part Configuration Problem Solving for Electronic Commerce

인터넷 전자상거래 환경에서 부품구성기법 활용 연구

Configuration is a set of building block processes, a series of selection and combining parts or components which composes a whole thing. A whole thing could be such a configurable object as manufacturing product, network system, financial portfolio, system development plan, project team, etc. Configuration problem could happen during any phase of product life cycle: design, production, sales, installation, and maintenance. Configuration has long been one of cost and time consuming work, because only high salaried technical experts on product and components can do configuration. Rework for error adjustments of configurations at later process causes far much cost and time, so accurate configuration is required. Under the on-line electronic commerce environment, configuration problem solving becomes more important, because component-based sales should be done automatically on the merchant web site. Automated product search, order placement, order fulfillment and payment make that manual configuration is no longer feasible. Automated configuration means that all the constraints among components should be checked and confirmed by configuration engine automatically. In addition, technical constraints and customer preferences like price range and a specific function required should be considered. This paper gives an brief overview of configuration problems: characteristics, representation paradigms, and solving algorithms and introduce CRSP(Constraint and Rule Satisfaction Problem) method. CRSP method adopts both constraint and rule for configuration domain knowledge representation. A survey and analysis on web sites adopting configuration functions are provided. Future directions of configuration for EC is discussed in the three aspects: methodology itself, companies adopting configuration function, and electronic commerce industry.