ABSTRACT
Knowledge-based product configuration systems play an important role in modern business strategies. These systems support the sales representative or the technical engineer to cope with the complexity of configurable products, the huge number of available variants, and different restrictions on allowed product constellations. Nowadays, typical knowledge-based configuration systems are not well integrated into standard software development processes but use proprietary knowledge representation formalisms which are not understandable for domain experts. In this chapter we show how the Unified Modeling Language (UML) can be applied as domain-oriented notation for the design of configuration knowledge bases. The provided modeling concepts can be used for comprehensible knowledge acquisition and are given precise semantics, such that an automatic translation to executable configuration knowledge bases is feasible. Following a discussion on these modeling concepts we show how their expressiveness can be enhanced by using the Object Constraint Language (OCL) and how the construction of complex configuration models can be supported.
