This is the website for the special issue on configuration of the AIEDAM Journal, April 2003, Vol.17, No.2.

News

• Due to several external problems, the schedule has been changed quite a lot. See below for details.
• The submission procedure has been changed a bit and the deadline for submitting the full paper postponed to March 15th due to requests for more time! See below for details.

Configuration

Edited by: Timo Soininen and Markus Stumptner

The configuration problem can be defined as the composition of a complex product from a set of pre-defined component types while taking into account a set of well-defined restrictions on how the component types can be combined. Important real-world industrial configuration tasks are encountered in marketing, manufacturing, and design. They usually involve physical products, but can also refer to financial or other services or software. Due to their complexity, these tasks must often be supported by dedicated software tools (configurators). Efficient development and maintenance of configurators require sophisticated software development techniques. AI methods are central to the development of powerful configuration tools and to extending configurator functionality. A wide range of AI techniques such as constraint satisfaction and its extensions, description logics, logic programming, and different specialized problem solving methods are being used for this purpose.

Configuration, always a successful AI application area, has recently attracted renewed research and industrial interest, as demonstrated, e.g., by the recent workshops on configuration at AAAI'99, ECAI 2000, and IJCAI'01. With the rise of E-business and web-based configuration services, the field presents many new and old challenges to researchers and application developers.

The goal of this special issue is to demonstrate the state of the art in configuration research. We invite submissions describing novel research involving AI in configuration-related areas, including but not limited to:

Configuration problems and models

Methods for computing configurations and supporting configuration tasks

Configurators and configurator utilization

Configuration and product design, product data management, and production management

We hope to attract a balance of

• new and innovative papers on theoretical issues, justified by practical concerns,
• practical applications applying a well-defined theory or model, and
• thorough case studies highlighting practical problems, needs and experiences, especially long-term experiences or new application situations, e.g. in e-commerce.

Also welcome are articles that survey different approaches and thoroughly analyze their differences and commonalities.

Papers will be anonymously refereed by at least two referees in order to select papers for publication in the special issue. Quality papers that are not selected may be considered for standard publication in AIEDAM.

Important dates:

Abstract submission deadline: 1st Mar 2002
Hard deadline for submitting full papers: 15th Mar 2002
Reviews due: 26th June 2002
Notification and reviews to authors: 7th July 2002
Revised version submission deadline: 15th Sep 2002
Papers needing re-reviews to reviewers: 16th Sep 2002
Re-reviews due:  6th Oct 2002
Final notification and re-reviews to all authors: 13th Oct 2002
Final version submission deadline: 30th Oct 2002
Final version DL to CUP: 6th Nov 2002

Submission:

Note: The submission instructions have been changed to give authors a bit more time to prepare the manuscripts! The new deadline for submitting full papers, 15th Mar 2002, is hard. Submissions received after this may be returned unopened.

For the first submission, please follow the author's instructions of AI EDAM with the following important exceptions:

• The submission address is aiedamconfig@soberit.hut.fi. For hard-copy submissions, please use Timo Soininen's address, below.
• Submit by the 1st of Mar 2002 a one page summary of the paper you intend to submit without author identification containing the title, the abstract and a few keywords, and a separate title page containing author identification.
• Submit the full paper at the latest on 15th of Mar 2002.
• Manuscript preparation and style: the paper should be typed in double spacing throughout, including tables, footnotes, references and legends to tables and figures. The paper should be less than 50 pages of double-space typescript in length. One side of the paper, only, should be used and there should be a margin of at least 2.5 cm all around. Tables, figures, footnotes etc. can be included in-line in the text. Where it is essential for clear crossreferencing, particularly in mathematically-orientated material, paragraphs and subparagraphs may be numbered, and the decimal system should be used, i.e. 1.1.1., 1.1.2., etc. Numbers should be spelled out when they occur at the beginning of a sentence; use Arabic numerals elsewhere.
• You can ignore the instructions pertaining to the final submission.

Please remember to include the separate title page with author identification and do not include author identification in the Abstract and Keywords page. In addition, when referring to your own previously published work, do not use first person ("... we showed that...") but a neutral reference ("... Smith (1999) showed that ..."), to preserve anonymity as much as possible.

Please direct enquiries to the guest editors at aiedamconfig@soberit.hut.fi.

Guest editors:

Timo Soininen
Helsinki University of Technology
Software Business and Engineering Institute
POB 9600, FIN-02015 HUT, FINLAND
E-mail: Timo.Soininen@hut.fi

Markus Stumptner
University of South Australia, Adelaide
Advanced Computing Research Center
5095 Mawson Lakes SA, AUSTRALIA
E-mail: mst@cs.unisa.edu.au