A tool to bridge the gap from functional dependencies to configuration rules translating knowledge on functional restrictions from systems engineers to a configurator for sales and decision makers

Abstract

Facing increasing individual demands and complexity the management of the system configuration and variants is challenging. Especially the interface between systems engineering and sales can be a bottleneck. While configurators help to generate valid system variants, the definition of configuration rules is essential. However the functional dependencies often are implicit knowledge of the systems engineer and are not known to the sales departments. This paper develops a tool to bridge this gap. It supports the systems engineers to store their knowledge using logical dependencies and translates them into a configurator. It moreover enhances the configurator by a comparison to realized and existing projects, to identify similar configurations and thus improve the order acquisition process.