Variability and Complexity: Automotive Product Line Management as a Constraint Satisfaction Problem

Everybody has configured a car on the web site of an automotive manufacturer, but probably few are aware of the wide diversity of vehicles offered. The specificity of the automotive product of a generalist manufacturer like Renault is the combination of a very big number of variants of vehicles and a complex net of constraints on these products. Classical database tools are not enough to cope with this mix of diversity and complexity: requests and computing on the vehicle range must be done with Constraint Satisfaction solvers. These tools must be used at each level of the value chain that goes from the engineering level to the after-sale. The needed services are vehicle configuration, but other types of treatments, such as documentation consistency control, definition of the Bill of Material, repair methods, factories capacity planning. This keynote will present a global roundup of the types of CSP services needed by different business stages of the enterprise, and some indication on the in-house knowledge compilation technology Renault developed to implement these functions.