Constraint-based Vehicle Configuration: A Case Study

The existence of powerful constraint satisfaction algorithms is not the sole reason of the wide success of the CSP framework. The interest of this framework is also that it offers a generic and simple way for the modeling of real world applications. Nevertheless these applications call for tasks that often differ from a classical search for a solution. The aim of the present paper is not to provide the AI community with new and efficient algorithms, but with new requests and more generally new needs. All of them are issued from the analysis of the business needs that arise around the design and exploitation of the vehicle range at Renault, the French car manufacturer. Viewing this application as a fruitful source of research problematics for the community, we present a formalization and a theoretical study, in terms on complexity, of the series of requests risen by the application.