Comparing Two Implementations of a Complete and Backtrack-Free Interactive Configurator

A product configurator should be complete and backtrack free in the sense that the user can choose freely between any valid configuration and will be prevented from making choices that no valid configuration satisfies. In this paper, we experimentally evaluate a symbolic and search-based implementation of an interactive product configuration algorithm with these properties. Our results show that the symbolic approach often has several orders of magnitude faster response time than the search-based approach due to the precompilation of a symbolic representation of the solution space. Moreover, the difference between the average and worst response time for the symbolic approach is typically within a factor of two, whereas it for the search-based approach may be more than two orders of magnitude.

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