Enhancing Web-Based Configuration with Recommendations and Cluster-Based Help

In a collaborative project with Tacton AB, we have investigated new ways of assisting the user in the process of on-line product configuration. A web-based prototype, RIND, was built for ephemeral users in the domain of PC configuration

Metamorphic Domain-Specific Languages: A Journey Into the Shapes of a Language

External or internal domain-specific languages (DSLs) or (fluent) APIs? Whoever you are -- a developer or a user of a DSL -- you usually have to choose your side; you should not! What about metamorphic DSLs that change their shape according to your needs? We report on our 4-years journey of providing the "right" support (in the domain of feature modeling), leading us to develop an external DSL, different shapes of an internal API, and maintain all these languages. A key insight is that there is no one-size-fits-all solution or no clear superiority of a solution compared to another. On the contrary, we found that it does make sense to continue the maintenance of an external and internal DSL. The vision that we foresee for the future of software languages is their ability to be self-adaptable to the most appropriate shape (including the corresponding integrated development environment) according to a particular usage or task. We call metamorphic DSL such a language, able to change from one shape to another shape

Product portfolio management as part of product lifecycle management for configure-to-order products

Abstract. Product portfolio management (PPM) research has mainly focused on PPM practices by covering the early stage of the lifecycle and not the whole lifecycle of the product. In addition, lifecycle management has been applied to individual products rather than the entire product portfolio. In this thesis, PPM research focuses on both all lifecycle phases and the entire product portfolio rather than only individual products. The research aims to study how configurable products should be arranged in the case company’s future Product lifecycle management (PLM) system. The case company of the thesis is Valmet Flow Control Oy, which delivers flow control technologies and services for different industries. The current Product data management (PDM) system in use is no longer supported and it is seen that the PDM system does not support the company’s needs anymore. Therefore, a new PLM system is needed to cover future demands in the case company. The product portfolio is composed of a product series, which refers to a certain product type and model. This thesis focuses on configure-to-order (CTO) products, which are configured based on customers’ needs with pre-defined specifications. This thesis proposes, how to present product series level object in the PLM system and what kind of product data it contains. The main result of the research is the created product series object in the future PLM system and how to manage product series through their lifecycle in one centralized system with all internal stakeholders. The availability, traceability, and data use are also essential results. Appropriate exploitation of data allows to reveal the most critical information, enabling the management of the whole product portfolio from one PLM system. This kind of procedure creates transparency in the product portfolio.Tuoteportfolion hallinta osana tuotteen elinkaaren hallintaa tilauksesta määritettäville tuotteille. Tiivistelmä. Tuoteportfolion hallinnan (PPM) tutkimukset ovat pääasiassa keskittyneet PPM:n käytäntöihin elinkaaren alkuvaiheessa eikä tuotteen koko elinkaaren hallintaan (PLM). Lisäksi PLM:ää on sovellettu yksittäisten tuotteiden tasolla eikä niinkään koko tuoteportfolion tasolla. Tässä diplomityössä PPM:n tutkimus keskittyy sekä koko tuotteen elinkaaren vaiheisiin että koko tuoteportfolioon yksittäisten tuotteiden sijasta. Tutkimuksen tarkoituksena on tutkia kuinka konfiguroitavat tuotteet pitäisi järjestellä tulevaan PLM-järjestelmään tapausyrityksessä. Diplomityön tapausyrityksenä on Valmet Flow Control Oy, joka toimittaa virtauksensäätöratkaisuja ja -palveluja eri teollisuudenaloille. Nykyistä käytössä olevaa tuotetiedonhallinta järjestelmää (PDM) ei enää ylläpidetä eikä PDM-järjestelmä tue yrityksen tarpeita enää. Tästä johtuen PLM-järjestelmää tarvitaan, jotta voidaan kattaa tulevaisuuden tarpeet tapausyrityksessä. Tuoteportfolio koostuu tuotesarjoista, joilla viitataan tiettyyn tuotetyyppiin ja malliin. Tämä diplomityö keskittyy tilauksesta määritettäviin tuotteisiin eli konfiguroitaviin tuotteisiin, jossa tuote konfiguroidaan asiakkaan tarpeiden mukaisesti ennalta määrättyjen spesifikaatioiden avulla. Tässä työssä esitetään kuinka tuotesarjatason objekti kuvataan PLM-järjestelmässä ja mitä tuotetietoja sille tarvitaan. Tutkimuken päätuloksena luodaan tuotesarjaobjekti tulevaisuuden PLM-järjestelmään ja tehdään kehitysehdotus siitä, kuinka tuotesarjoja tulisi hallita niiden koko elinkaaren ajan yhdessä järjestelmässä, ja kaikkien sisäisten sidosryhmien kanssa. Tiedon saatavuus, jäljitettävyys sekä hyödyntäminen ovat myös pääasiallisia työn tuloksia. Tiedon oikeanlainen hyödyntäminen mahdollistaa kriittisimmän tiedon esittämisen ja siten mahdollistaa koko tuoteportfolion hallinnan yhdestä PLM-järjestelmästä

The Configurable SAT Solver Challenge (CSSC)

It is well known that different solution strategies work well for different types of instances of hard combinatorial problems. As a consequence, most solvers for the propositional satisfiability problem (SAT) expose parameters that allow them to be customized to a particular family of instances. In the international SAT competition series, these parameters are ignored: solvers are run using a single default parameter setting (supplied by the authors) for all benchmark instances in a given track. While this competition format rewards solvers with robust default settings, it does not reflect the situation faced by a practitioner who only cares about performance on one particular application and can invest some time into tuning solver parameters for this application. The new Configurable SAT Solver Competition (CSSC) compares solvers in this latter setting, scoring each solver by the performance it achieved after a fully automated configuration step. This article describes the CSSC in more detail, and reports the results obtained in its two instantiations so far, CSSC 2013 and 2014

Efficient Benchmarking of Algorithm Configuration Procedures via Model-Based Surrogates

The optimization of algorithm (hyper-)parameters is crucial for achieving peak performance across a wide range of domains, ranging from deep neural networks to solvers for hard combinatorial problems. The resulting algorithm configuration (AC) problem has attracted much attention from the machine learning community. However, the proper evaluation of new AC procedures is hindered by two key hurdles. First, AC benchmarks are hard to set up. Second and even more significantly, they are computationally expensive: a single run of an AC procedure involves many costly runs of the target algorithm whose performance is to be optimized in a given AC benchmark scenario. One common workaround is to optimize cheap-to-evaluate artificial benchmark functions (e.g., Branin) instead of actual algorithms; however, these have different properties than realistic AC problems. Here, we propose an alternative benchmarking approach that is similarly cheap to evaluate but much closer to the original AC problem: replacing expensive benchmarks by surrogate benchmarks constructed from AC benchmarks. These surrogate benchmarks approximate the response surface corresponding to true target algorithm performance using a regression model, and the original and surrogate benchmark share the same (hyper-)parameter space. In our experiments, we construct and evaluate surrogate benchmarks for hyperparameter optimization as well as for AC problems that involve performance optimization of solvers for hard combinatorial problems, drawing training data from the runs of existing AC procedures. We show that our surrogate benchmarks capture overall important characteristics of the AC scenarios, such as high- and low-performing regions, from which they were derived, while being much easier to use and orders of magnitude cheaper to evaluate