Managing variants of a personalized product

Albert Haag
2016 Journal of Intelligent Information Systems  
A product variant table is a table that lists legal combinations of product features. Variant tables can be used to constrain the variability offered for a personalized product. The concept of such a table is easy to understand. Hence, variant tables are natural to use when ensuring the completeness and correctness of a quote/order for a customizable product. They are also used to filter out inadmissible choices for features in an interactive specification (configuration) process. Variant
more » ... can be maintained as relational (database) tables, using spreadsheets, or in proprietary ways offered by the product modeling environment. Variant tables can become quite large. A way of compressing them is then sought that supports a space-efficient representation and a time-efficient evaluation. The motivation of this work is to develop a simple approach to compress/compile a variant table into an easy to read, but possibly hard to write form that can be deployed in a business setting at acceptable cost and risk in a similar manner as a database. The main result is a simple compression and evaluation scheme for an individual variant table called a Variant Decomposition Diagram (VDD). A VDD supports efficient consistency checks, the filtering of inadmissible features, and iteration over the table. A simple static heuristic for decomposition order is proposed that suggests itself from a "column oriented viewpoint". This heuristic is not always optimal, but it has the advantage of allowing fast compilation of a variant table into a VDD. Compression results for a publicly available model of a Renault Megane are given. With the proposed heuristic the VDD is a specialization of a Zero-suppressed (binary) Decision I want to thank the reviewers and my daughter Laura for substantial constructive criticism of the original manuscript, all of which I have tried to incorporate here. Any remaining shortcomings are my own. Disclaimer: While the motivation for this work lies in my past at SAP and experiences with its product configurators (Blumöhr et al. 2012; Haag 2014) , all work on this article and its precursors (Haag 2015a, b) was performed privately after transition into partial retirement without a work obligation at SAP. The implementation is not related to SAP software in any way. It is neither endorsed by SAP nor does it reflect ongoing SAP development.
doi:10.1007/s10844-016-0432-5 fatcat:dlodlqt7srcjpagm5oj62p4fva