ABSTRACT
The European SWOP, Semantic Web-based Open engineering Platform, project is concerned with business innovation when specifying products to suit end-user requirements. There are two main business drivers behind this innovation: (1) to reduce wasted effort in terms of cost and time in re-designing and re-specifying products when for the most part the work has been done before, and (2) to configure solutions from pre-defined partial solutions (‘modules’) rather than design from scratch. When there are choices, product configurations are optimized in SWOP by applying GeneticAlgorithms (GA) so that the resulting product is not just a valid solution but even a nearoptimal solution that can be achieved following design constraints, end-user requirements and optimisation criteria.
