In many cases competitiveness of modern products is de ned by the degree of customization, i.e. the ability of a manufacturer to adapt a product according to customer requirements. Knowledge based con guration methods support the composition of complex systems from a set of adjustable components. However, there are two important prerequisites for a successful application of knowledge-based con guration in practice: (a) expressive knowledge representation languages, which are able to capture the complexity of various models of con gurable products and (b) powerful reasoning methods which are capable of providing services such as solution search, optimization, diagnosis, etc. The Con guration Workshop aims to bring together industry representatives and researchers from various areas of AI to identify important con guration scenarios found in practice, exchange ideas and experiences and present original methods developed to solve con guration problems. The workshop continues the series of successful Con guration Workshops started at the AAAI'96 Fall Symposium and continued on IJCAI, AAAI, and ECAI since 1999. During this time the focus of the events broadened from con guration approaches applied to traditional products such as cars, digital cameras, PC, telecommunication switches or railway interlock systems to con guration of software and services available on the Web. In parallel, research in the eld of constraint programming, description logic, non-monotonic reasoning, fundamentals of con guration modeling and so forth pushed the limits of con guration systems even further. The papers selected this year for presentation on the Con guration Workshop continue a recent trend in the research community and focus on modeling and solving of con guration problems.
Wolfgang Mayer Patrick Albert
Tacton Systems AB, Sweden Oracle Corporation, USA University of Oxford, UK Technische Universitat Graz/Con gworks, Austria AAU Klagenfurt, Austria SAP AG, Germany Siemens AG, Austria Universitat Hamburg, Germany Tacton System AB, Sweden University of South Australia, Australia Cork Constraint Computation Centre, Ireland Aalto University, Finland