Lococo 2012 - Workshop on Logics for Component Configuration

Representing and solving configuration problems is a hot topic of great importance for many application domains. For example, modern software distributions are based on the notion of components, which denote units of independent development and deployment. Components provide the necessary flexibility when organizing a complex software distribution, but also are a challenge when it comes to selecting components from a large repository of possible choices, and configuring these components according to user needs, resource constraints, and interdependencies with other components. Some well-known examples of complex systems of components in the world of Free and Open Source software are software packages of distributions for GNU/Linux, BSD, or Eclipse plugins. A different application domain is manufacturing where a company seeks to meet the varying needs of customers by assembling configurable products from components.
Understanding and solving these questions is an attractive research topic since, on the one hand, the problems to be solved are complex and interesting for researchers working on solving techniques. On the other hand, research in this area has the potential of high impact on the way how the systems that we all use every day are developed, deployed, and maintained.
Not only adequate logical formalisms to represent a configuration problem are required, but also sophisticated reasoning technologies to deal with large amounts of data. Further relevant aspects include diagnosis of failed configuration settings and an intelligent behavior dealing with user preferences.
This workshop will focus on logic-based methods for specifying and solving complex configuration problems. The goal of the workshop is to bring together both researchers and practitioners active in the area of component configuration of systems, using different modeling and solving techniques, such as constraint and logic programming, description logics, satisfiability and its extensions. The workshop will be an opportunity to discuss common and complementary solutions for solving component configuration.