Configuration interactive et contraintes : connaissances, filtrage et extensions

The value of our research work is rooted in the following observations :-1- the life cycle of products, systems, services and processes is tending to get shorter ; -2- new designs and updates of products on the market are becoming more and more frequent, leading to increasingly short design cycles ; -3 technologies are constantly changing, requiring permanent, ongoing acquisition of knowledge ; -4-the diversity of products offered on the market is growing all the time, ranging from customizable or configurable to made-to-measure or designed to order.These trends, and the mass of information and knowledge that requires treating as a result of them, are placing heavy demands on designers, requiring ever more attentiveness and increasingly intense cognitive effort. The result is an increased risk that the product does not fully meet the customer’s needs, that it is difficult to implement or manufacture, or that it will be prohibitively expensive. The aim of our work is thus to help the design process to reduce these risks and errors by delivering software tools and methodological environments that serve to capitalize and exploit general, contextual, academic, expert or business knowledge.Our work on various complex industrial cases has led us to take into consideration two kinds of knowledge, involving on the one hand the "product domain" and on the other the "product diversity element". Each kind of knowledge leads to differing industrial cases. The first kind of knowledge encompasses the scientific and technical aspects, but also the specific rules governing the business in question. This knowledge is required in order to define the product itself, and involves issues that can be resolved by aiding the product /system/service design. The second kind of knowledge relates to the diverse nature of the products, and involves issues of customization or configuration of the product/system/service.Our aim is to help in what might be called "routine" design, where different kinds and various types of knowledge exist, due to the recurrent nature of the activity. We consider that aid in design or configuration can be formalized, either completely or partially, in the form of a constraint satisfaction problem (CSP). In this context, we focus more specifically on interactive decision-support, by introducing the principles of filtering or constraint propagation. The diversity of knowledge formalized as a CSP and the interaction with the user allow us to assemble and adapt filtering algorithms in a generic constraint propagation engine, integrated in our CoFiADe software solution.In addition, this formalism based on CSP constraints is complemented by : - ontologies to structure knowledge and facilitate its reuse throughout the development cycle, - analogy-based approaches taking advantage of contextual knowledge encapsulated in the case under study, so as to make recommendations to the user on the choice of values, - evolutionary approaches to optimize the search for multi-criteria solutions.Les travaux de recherche présentés dans ce mémoire trouvent leurs fondements dans les constats suivants :-1- la durée de vie des produits et systèmes tend à se réduire,-2- les conceptions et les actualisations des produits mis sur le marché sont de plus en plus fréquentes alors que les cycles de conception sont toujours plus brefs,-3- les technologies employées en constante évolution nécessitent une acquisition de connaissance permanente,-4- la diversité des produits offerte sur les marchés ne cesse de croître allant des produits personnali- sables ou configurés jusqu’aux produits sur-mesure et conçus à la commande.Ces tendances et la masse d’informations et de connaissances à traiter en découlant exigent des concepteurs toujours plus d’attention et un travail cognitif toujours plus intense. Il en résulte une augmentation des risques, que le produit réponde imparfaitement aux besoins du demandeur, qu’il soit difficilement réalisable et fabricable, ou encore qu’il le soit à un coût prohibitif. L’objectif de nos travaux est donc de limiter ces risques et erreurs en proposant des outils logiciels et des environnements méthodologiques destinés à capitaliser et exploiter des connaissances générales, contextuelles, académiques, expertes ou métier pour aider la conception.Les travaux effectués sur différentes problématiques industrielles ont conduit à prendre en considération deux natures de connaissances relevant du « domaine produit » et de la « diversité produit » conduisant à des problématiques industrielles différentes : la première nature de connaissance recouvre aussi bien des aspects scientifiques et techniques que des règles métier, elle est nécessaire pour la définition du produit et débouche sur des problématiques d’aide à la conception de produit ; la seconde nature est une connaissance liée à la diversité des produits, qui débouche sur les problématiques d’aide à la personnalisation ou configuration de produit.Nous visons à aider un type de conception plutôt « routinier » où de la connaissance de différentes natures et de divers types existe du fait de la récurrence de l’activité. Nous considérons de plus dans nos travaux que l’aide à la conception ou configuration peut se formaliser, complètement ou partiellement, comme un problème de satisfaction de contraintes (CSP). Dans ce cadre, nous nous intéressons plus spécifiquement à l’aide à la décision interactive exploitant les principes de filtrage ou de propagation de contraintes. Notre objectif se décline alors en l’accompagnement des concepteurs dans la construction des solutions répondant au mieux à leurs problèmes, en retirant progressivement de l’espace des solutions, celles qui ne sont plus cohérentes avec les décisions prises, en estimant celles-ci au fil de leur construction et/ou en les optimisant.en complément, nous associons à ce formalisme à base de contraintes CSP :- des ontologies pour structurer les connaissances et faciliter leur réutilisateion sur l’ensemble du cycle de développement,- des approches par analogie exploitant de la connaissance contextuelle encapsulée dans des cas afin de proposer à l’utilisateur des recommandations quant aux choix de valeurs,- des approches évolutionnaires pour optimiser la recherche des solutions de manière multicritère

Generic bill of functions, materials, and operations for SAP2 configuration

International audienceMost available studies on configuration focus on either sales configuration specifying functional features or production configuration addressing product components. It has been well recognised that automating most of the activities associated with specification, engineering, and process planning of customised products and their interactions is one key in achieving product customisation. Thus, treating sales configuration and product configuration separately may not contribute to product customisation from a systematic view although they may lead to the improvement of individual stages. Recognising this limitation of existing studies, in this paper, we propose integrated SAles, Product and Production (SAP2) configuration, which helps achieve product customisation from a holistic view. Its rationale lies in automating consistently sales, product and production configuration activities in one system. In view of the importance of configuration models, we focus on the model underpinning SAP2 configuration called generic bill of functions, materials and operations (GBoFMO) and discuss it in detail. As the core of SAP2 configuration, GBoFMO can provide companies with an insight into organising the large volumes of data and knowledge in the life cycle of product family development. We also report a case study of light passenger aircrafts to illustrate the GBoFMO

JFPC 2019 - Actes des 15es Journées Francophones de Programmation par Contraintes

National audienceLes JFPC (Journées Francophones de Programmation par Contraintes) sont le principal congrès de la communauté francophone travaillant sur les problèmes de satisfaction de contraintes (CSP), le problème de la satisfiabilité d'une formule logique propositionnelle (SAT) et/ou la programmation logique avec contraintes (CLP). La communauté de programmation par contraintes entretient également des liens avec la recherche opérationnelle (RO), l'analyse par intervalles et différents domaines de l'intelligence artificielle.L'efficacité des méthodes de résolution et l'extension des modèles permettent à la programmation par contraintes de s'attaquer à des applications nombreuses et variées comme la logistique, l'ordonnancement de tâches, la conception d'emplois du temps, la conception en robotique, l'étude du génôme en bio-informatique, l'optimisation de pratiques agricoles, etc.Les JFPC se veulent un lieu convivial de rencontres, de discussions et d'échanges pour la communauté francophone, en particulier entre doctorants, chercheurs confirmés et industriels. L'importance des JFPC est reflétée par la part considérable (environ un tiers) de la communauté francophone dans la recherche mondiale dans ce domaine.Patronnées par l'AFPC (Association Française pour la Programmation par Contraintes), les JFPC 2019 ont lieu du 12 au 14 Juin 2019 à l'IMT Mines Albi et sont organisées par Xavier Lorca (président du comité scientifique) et par Élise Vareilles (présidente du comité d'organisation)

Aiding design with constraints: an extension of quad trees in order to deal with piecewise functions

Issu de : IESM'05 - International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Systems Management, Marrakech, MOROCCO, May 16-19, 2005International audienceThis paper deals with aiding preliminary design when considered as a constraint satisfaction problem (CSP). In this case, constraint filtering techniques provide some kind of interactive assistance to the designer. However, some kinds of numerical constraints corresponding with numerical relations cannot be filtered precisely with classical analytical filtering techniques such as interval arithmetic or box-consistency; it is therefore necessary to discretize them in order to include them in the CSP. To this end, quad trees (QT) have been proposed for binary constraints, or 2k trees when more than two variables are considered; but QT assume that a constraint must be defined by a single numerical function. The aim of this paper is to show that QT techniques can be extended when a constraint is defined by a piecewise function or by a set of numerical functions defined on intervals. The first section recalls some basics relevant to the preliminary design problem and the interests of the CSP assistance. The second section presents the principles of the QT. The last section describes our contributions relevant to QT extensions dealing with piecewise functions

Representative Benchmark for Concurrent Product and Process Configuration Problem: Definitions and Some Problem Instances

International audienceThis paper considers the Optimization of Concurrent Product and Process Configuration problems (O-CPPC) that satisfy various number of criteria, which rely on the customer’s requirements and the objectives of the company. Various works have proposed evolutionary optimization algorithms dedicated to this concurrent configuration problem with generic model propositions due to this paper is relevant to the evaluation of these optimization algorithms. The aim of this paper is to define a set of instances of the generic model that represent a large family of problems. First, a background of the Optimization of Concurrent Product and Process Configuration problems is introduced. Next, some basic definitions of an O-CPPC generic model are analyzed. Then, the main general parameters to define an instance are presented (Product Structure, Process Structure, Model Size and Model Constraint Density) in order to propose some general evaluation tests. And finally, to be consistent with the previous works, some basic cases are described to show how to deal with this kind of problem in an organized way

Industrial Services Characterization for Bidding Process

International audienceWhen responding to call for tenders, many bidding companies offer services. This paper focuses on how to model industrial services during the bidding process to be able to easily develop them. A product offer configuration model is presented, then a reflection about the extension of this model to service offers is conducted. A study of the literature about service definition is dealt and services characteristics are identified. Their impact on the product offer model is analyzed and new characteristics are introduced. This work makes possible to propose a typology to adapt the product offer model to services

Optimisation of the concurrent product and process configuration: an approach to reduce computation time with an experimental evaluation

International audienceConcurrent configuration of a product and its associated production process is a challenging problem in customer/supplier relations dealing with customisable or configurable products. It gathers in a single model multiple choices and constraints which come simultaneously from products (choices of components or functionalities), from processes (choices of resources and quantities) and from their mutual interrelations. Considering this problem as a Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP), the aim of this article is to improve its optimisation, while considering multiple objectives. Using an existing evolutionary optimisation algorithm as a basis, we propose an approach that reduces the computation time required for optimisation. The idea is first to quickly compute a rough Pareto of solutions, then ask the user to select an area of interest, and finally to launch a second computation on this restricted area. After an introduction to the problem, the approach is explained and the algorithm adaptations are presented. Then various computation experiments results demonstrate that computation times are significantly reduced while keeping the optimality level

A Search Engine Optimization Recommender System

International audienceSearch Engine Optimization reefers to the process of im- proving the position of a given website in a web search engine results. This is typically done by adding a set of parameters and metadata to the hypertext files of the website. As nowadays the majority of the web-content creators are non-experts, automation of the search en- gine optimization process becomes a necessity. On this regard, this paper presents a recommender system to improve search engine op- timization based on the site’s content and creator’s preferences. It exploits text analysis for labels and tags, artificial intelligence for deducing content intention and topics, and case-based reasoning for generating recommendations of parameters and metadata. Recom- mendations are given in natural language using a predefined set of sentences

ISIEM: a methodology to deploy a knowledge-based system to support bidding process

When responding to calls for tenders, companies must elaborate on relevant bids relative to the needs and expectations of customers (for example, in terms of price and delay). We built and deployed a knowledge-based system (KBS) to aid companies when developing bids. Based on a pre-defined generic bid model, a methodology to support companies when deploying the KBS is proposed in this paper. To capture, formalize, and reuse knowledge relevant to bids, a combination of several approaches, such as taxonomy, constraint satisfaction problem, and case-based reasoning, is proposed. The methodology is composed of five steps: Initialization, Specialization, Implementation, Exploitation, and Maintenance. A case study from a company building electrical parts of harbor lifting devices illustrates our proposal and allows validating the proposed methodology.Outils logiciels et ProcEssus pour la Réponse à Appel d'Offre