Overview: Representing and solving configuration problems have always been subjects of interest for applying and developing AI techniques. Powerful knowledge-representation formalisms are necessary to capture the great variety and complexity of configurable product models. Furthermore, efficient reasoning methods are required to provide intelligent interactive behavior in configurator software, such as solution search, satisfaction of user preferences, personalization, optimization, diagnosis, etc.

Nowadays, different AI approaches are well established as central technologies in many industrial configuration systems. This wide-spread industrial use of AI-based configurators makes the field more challenging than ever: the complexity of configurable products still increases, the mass-customization paradigm is extended to fields like service and software configuration, personalized (web-based) user interaction and user preference elicitation are of increasing importance, and finally, the integration of configurators into surrounding IT infrastructures like business information systems or web applications becomes a critical issue.

The workshop continues the series of eight successful Configuration Workshops started at the AAAI 1996 Fall Symposium and continued on IJCAI, AAAI, and ECAI since 1999. Beside researchers from a variety of different fields, past events also attracted a significant number of industrial participants from major configurator vendors like Tacton, SAP, Oracle, or ILOG, as well as from end-users like Siemens, HP, or DaimlerChrysler.

Goal: The main goal of the workshop is to promote high-quality research in all technical areas related to configuration. As such, the workshop is of interest for researchers working in the various fields within the wide range of applicable AI technologies (e.g. Constraint Programming, Description Logics, Non-monotonic Reasoning, Case-Based Reasoning, ...). It serves as a platform for researchers and industrial participants to exchange needs, ideas, benchmarks, and use cases. Collocated with AAAI 2007 the Workshop on Configuration provides an ideal forum to attract high-quality submissions.

Submissions: Workshop participation will be by invitation only. If you would like to participate, submit either a full paper of no more than 6 pages (or 6,000 words), or a position statement, short paper, or problem instance (at most 3 pages or 3,000 words). Short papers may address an important problem for further research or describe a practical problem or an interesting lesson learned. In addition, we solicit proposals for short demonstrations (at most 3 pages with demonstrations taking at most 15 minutes).

Topics: Areas of interest include the following:

• Configuration problems and models
  (structure of configuration problems; knowledge representation and acquisition; fuzzy and incomplete knowledge; knowledge base verification, validation and diagnosis; standardization of catalog exchange formats; configuration problems, including discrete/continuous/mixed constraints; product and process configuration; service configuration; product design and configuration).
• Reasoning methods
  (constraint satisfaction problems and extensions, preference based reasoning, description logics, rules, case-based reasoning, SAT-solving, local search, genetic algorithms, neural networks, problem decomposition, optimization, multicriteria optimization, symmetry breaking, cooperative configuration processes, reconfiguration of existing systems, explanations, distributed problem solving, benchmark proposals, [knowledge-based] recommendation).
• Interactivity and e-business
  (personalization, ontology, intelligent man machine interaction, machine learning, client/server architecture, configuration web service, distributed configuration, configuration process modeling). Integration into the business process (product data management, CAD, pricing, ERP, CRM, process configuration).
• Applications and tools
  (configuration tools, design tools, application reports, case studies, real-world challenges, test environments for configuration knowledge bases).