Responsive consistency restoration in interactive product configuration by content-addressable memory

With the context of individualized product design in mass customization, the practice of product configuration is transformed from traditional unidirectional process into bidirectional design interactions. In this interactive configuration manner, maintaining the consistency of configuration assignments, often referred to as consistency restoration, is one of the primary issues which should be addressed. The task of consistency restoration faces two great challenges: the uncertainty and individualized flexibility of customer requirements. The uncertainty turns problem dynamic and deteriorates the computational complexity of existing consistency restoration methods. The individualized flexibility turns the task of consistency restoration ill-structured. Consequently, these two characteristics increase the response time in interactive configuration and make companies face the challenge of ‘customization-responsiveness squeeze’. To leverage this problem, this paper proposes a responsive approach to facilitate the task of consistency restoration. A methodology based on content-addressable memory (CAM) is established, which compiles a CSP-based consistency restoration into a memory recalling process and automatically corrects the incompleteness and inconsistency within the memory. Specific orientation mechanism based on customer preference is proposed to introduce customer flexibility into CAM model. The resulting oriented-CAM method is demonstrated by a case study and the performance and responsiveness are analyzed.