Multi-SPLOT: Supporting Multi-user Configurations with Constraint Programming

Abstract

Nowadays, companies have moved from offering a single product for all their clients, to offer different customized for each one. These companies provide Configuration Systems where a user can decide and discard which features she wants in her final product. However, although almost all of these systems support individual decisions, usually they do not offer an special support for decisions made by multiple users for the same product. This paper introduces Multi-SPLOT, a web-based Configuration System that supports simultaneous decisions from multiple users. This system uses off-the-shelf solvers to determine if these decisions are not conflicting among them, and to propose solutions when the decisions of an user conflict with decisions of the others. This paper shows the design of the solution and details of its implementation using Angular, Firebase and the optimization library in Google App Script.