Towards a general ontology of configuration

This article presents a generalized ontology of product configuration as a step towards a general ontology of configuration, which is needed to reuse and share configuration knowledge. The ontology presented consists of a set of concepts for representing the knowledge on a configuration and the restrictions on possible configurations. The ontology is based on a synthesis of the main approaches to configuration. Earlier approaches are extended with new concepts arising from our practical experience on configurable products. The concepts include components, attributes, resources, ports, contexts, functions, constraints, and relations between these. The main contributions of this work are in the detailed conceptualization of knowledge on product structures and in extending the resource concept with contexts for limiting the availability and use of resources. In addition, constraint sets representing different Views on the product are introduced. The ontology is compared with the previous work on configuration. It covers all the principal approaches, that is, connection-based, structure-based, resource-based, and function-based approaches to configuration. The dependencies between the concepts arising from different conceptualizations are briefly analyzed. Several ways in which the ontology could be extended are pointed out.