A Knowledge-Based Configurator That Supports Sales, Engineering, and Manufacturing at AT&T Network Systems

The product information contained in these sources frequently becomes obsolete and out of synch with the engineering drawings. Inaccurate orders, when combined with products that are so highly technical in nature, cause delays in order processing and manufacturing and can result in billing discrepancies. These operators were chosen at least in part to avoid intractability in the underlying subsumption algorithm (Levesque and Brachman 1987). In particular, the description language lacks true disjunction and has no way to express negation. Nevertheless, we have not encountered major problems when we encoded the product knowledge for our AT&T Network Systems products.