Interactive configurator with FO(.) and IDP-Z3

Abstract: Industry abounds with interactive configuration problems, i.e., constraint solving problems interactively solved by persons with the assistance of a computer. The computer program, called a configurator, needs to perform a variety of reasoning tasks with the (often incomplete) information that the user provides. Imperative programming approaches make such systems difficult to implement and maintain. Knowledge-based configurators have been proposed to help engineers solve such problems, but many challenges remain. We present IDP-Z3, a new reasoning engine for the FO(.) KR language, and we report on its use for building configurators automatically from a knowledge base.