Configuration as Composite Constraint Satisfaction

Selecting and arranging parts is the core of a con¬figuration task. The validity of a configuration is defined in terms of constraints. Highly declara¬tive, domain independent and simple to use, the constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) paradigm offers an adequate framework for this task. How-ever, the basic paradigm is not powerful enough to capture or to take advantage of essential as-pects of configuration, such as the unknown a priori number of constituent parts of a system or the inherent internal structure of these parts. Al¬though notable effort has been spent on extend¬ing the basic paradigm to accommodate these issues, we still lack a comprehensive formalism for configuration. This paper presents the main ideas behind a general constraint-based model of configuration tasks represented as a new class of nonstandard constraint satisfaction problems, called composite CSP. Composite CSP unifies several CSP extensions, providing a more com-prehensive and efficient basis for formulating and solving configuration problems.