Functional and Structural Reasoning
Staffan Pernler, Max Leitgeb · 1996
A configuration problem within the technical domain is the problem of putting together different parts into a complex system, given a description of the possible parts and the functionality of the required system. While workin~ with our master thesis (Leitgeb, Pernler 95) at SICS ~ during 93 and 94, we found only a few configuration systems extracting the functional reasoning from the structural. We herein motivate the need for functional reasoning as a basis to find meaningful control structures separated from the application domain knowledge, and that this, together with a separated structural approach to describe the possible parts of the artefact, might be a neat solution. We have defined a model for representing configuration problems in two dimensions: Functional knowledge of the function of the artefact. Structural knowledge about structure and possible parts of the artefact.