A development approach towards user-centered front-ends for knowledge-based engineering configurators: a study within planning of robot-based automation solutions

Abstract

Configurators are well-established strong researched expert systems due to the high popularity and gained benefits. Nevertheless, the aspects of user-centered design are rarely researched and applied during the development of configurator front-ends. However, when addressing a mass consumer market or non-experts end-users, the front-end represents the required crucial knowledge that bridges the end-user's current level of knowledge to the experts' knowledge. In order to push the application of knowledge-based engineering configurators for a mass market in SMEs, a user-centered configurator frond-end for the concept planning of robot-based automation systems is being developed within the platform project ROBOTOP. In this paper, the design of an architectural user-centered layer and a ten step development approach of user-centered front-ends are presented.