Product configuration: a review of the state-of-the-art and future research

Abstract

Being able to provide companies with a number of advantages in delivering customised products, product configuration has received increasing attention from the academia and lasting interests from industries in the past several decades. While several surveys and reviews have been reported shedding light on specific issues in product configuration, a general overview is missing. By systematically presenting important concepts, definitions and issues underlying product configuration, such a review is of paramount importance to develop practical solutions, which ultimately contributes to efficient design, development and implementation of product configurators in practice. This study, thus, tries to fill this gap by reviewing the state-of-the-art research on product configuration. It touches on the major issues, definitions and concepts in product configuration along with the corresponding studies, such as configuration ontology, system design and development, and configuration solving. Based on the review, future research is highlighted as well.

Keywords:

• Product configuration
• distributed configuration
• integrated configuration
• configuration optimisation
• ontology
• knowledge representation
• conceptual modelling

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions and comments, which helped me improve both the presentation and the quality of the paper.

Notes

1. This number does not include two pioneering articles on product configuration: (Mittal and Frayman 1989) and (McDermott 1982), one article used in Literature review methods: (Gosling and Naim 2009) and one book (Felfernig et al. 2014).