In partial fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Master of Science
Vidya
N. Iyer
will defend her thesis
Application of a Two-Tiered programming to a product configurator
Abstract
In order to remain competitive companies need to offer value-added solutions to customers and companies create product variants by using a product configuration. The thesis attempts to create a simple configurator to meet the immediate needs of a manufacturing company using Visual Basic (VB) an event driven software tool with a Microsoft Access database.
A combination of constraint based approach and case based reasoning was used to develop the software intelligence. The software attempts to emulate the consistency, completeness and optimization features of a commercial configurator. Upon rigorous user acceptance testing, the product was deployed and supported for knowledge maintenance.
This configurator enhances productivity and profit margins, streamlines the sales and design process by incorporating checks and balances, minimizes manual steps, and increases repeatability and design reuse.