Constraint-based knowledge representation for configuration systems Technical Report No. TR-94/59 Boi Faltings Rainer Weigel D´ epartement d’Informatique Laboratoire d’Intelligence Artificielle Ecole Polytechnique F´ ed´ erale de Lausanne (EPFL) IN-Ecublens, CH-1015 Lausanne Switzerland E-mail : Faltings Weigel @di.epfl.ch August, 1994 Abstract Configuration is a design activity where the set of available components and their allowed combinations are known a priori. Configuration systems of today are typically rule-based systems. Maintenance and verification of rule-based system has shown to be extremely difficult because the knowledge relating to a single entity is spreading over several rules and modifications to rules must be checked for interactions with other rules. Since the configuration knowledge of a product evolves during the whole life-cycle modifications and extension of the knowledge must be facilitated in order to build productive systems. We show, how using a constraint-based approach for the configuration task makes this problem simpler.