28th International Workshop on Configuration (ConfWS 2026)
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- August 15 - 16, 2026
- Venue: Bremen, co-located with IJCAI-ECAI 2026
- Format: Onsite
ConfWS aims
The Configuration Workshop (ConfWS) is a two-day event that started at the AAAI’96 Fall Symposium and from 1999 onwards has been continued at IJCAI, AAAI, ECAI, CP, and SPLC conferences, as well as stand-alone. The workshop promotes high-quality research in all technical areas related to configuration and to bring together researchers working in the various fields of applicable technologies and industry representatives. The main goal is to engage participants from academia and industry in a working group to foster synergies and act as incubator of solutions, scenarios possibilities, and future projects on Artificial Intelligence techniques in the configuration domain.
The aims of the ConfWS are complementary with those of the IJCAI-ECAI 2026 conference. Specifically, the workshop on configuration aims at promoting a design approach where the product being configured is composed from instances of a set of predefined component types that can be combined in ways defined by a set of constraints. This task requires knowledge representation formalisms and acquisition methods to capture the variety and complexity of configurable products. Furthermore, efficient reasoning methods are required to support intelligent interactive behaviour, solution search, satisfaction of user preferences, personalization, optimization, reconfiguration, and diagnosis. Constraint solving in combination with ontology reasoning have been the main technologies for configuration systems.
The 28th edition in 2026 is co-located within the 35th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-ECAI 2026)
While 2025 highlighted sustainability, 2026 will pivot to hybrid AI systems that fuse Generative AI (Gen-AI) with knowledge-based configuration and here especially knowledge representation. The agenda will explore how agentic and generative techniques can be integrated to produce adaptive configurators that learn from data, reason about preferences, and explain decisions to end users.
The target audience are scholars and practitioners from academia and industry working on the topics detailed in the following (but not limited to): Configuration Problems and Models; Definitions of configuration, reconfiguration, distributed configuration; Definitions of product, process, system, service configuration; Structure of configuration problems; Knowledge representation, ontologies, fuzzy and incomplete knowledge, standardization of catalogue exchange formats, feature models; Representations for product and process configuration, product design and configuration; Applications and Tools; Configuration tools, design tools, application reports, new application domains such as the Internet of Things (IoT), case studies, real-world challenges, test environments for configuration knowledge bases, configuration in related fields such as software configuration, service composition, and model-driven engineering; Environments for feature model development and maintenance, design theories for applications and tools.
