Introduction

Completing and maintaining product configuration of products with high variability is a challenging task. In the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, product configuration is driven by Variants – Variant values, Option Groups – Options, and Configuration Rules.

Before we dive deeper into the Rule deduced criteria, let’s go through important terminologies in the realm of model definition:

Variants: Variant is a feature that consists of two or more values. You can select one of the available values while defining the product configuration of a particular model version.

                                              Image 1: Example of Variant and its Values

Option Groups: It is an optional offering that consists of one or more options. You can select one or several options, or choose not to select any options.

                                        Image 2: Example of Option Group and its Options

Configuration Rules: These are used to ensure the validity and accuracy of the product configurations. Using Matrix (Interactive) or Expression (Expression based) rules, you can define valid, invalid, and required selections for specific combinations of variants, variant values, option groups, and options.

                                        Image 3: Example of Configuration Rule (Matrix Rule)

Rule Deduced Criteria

Defining and managing the product configuration for the products with high variability has following major challenges:

• Hundreds and sometimes thousands of Variants and Option Groups to configure.
• Complex set of Configuration Rules defined for multiple variants and option groups.
• Time constraints.

In such cases, you can leverage capabilities of the “Rule Deduced Criteria” to seamlessly perform your product configuration. Rule deduced criteria aides in effectively completing the product configuration. Following are the four options available in the Rule deduced criteria:

No Rules Applied

With the “No Rules Applied” criteria, configuration rules are neither applied nor considered. Pre-selected or default variants are not auto-populated. This option can be used when you want to create configuration by disregarding the available configuration rules. For example: While testing new configurations.

Compatible

With the “Compatible” criteria, configuration rules are applied due to which you can only select the compatible variant values. All the incompatible variants values are grayed-out. However, default values or pre-selected values are NOT populated automatically.

Aided

With the “Aided” criteria, configuration rules are applied and default value is also populated automatically. All the incompatible values are grayed out which means you can only select compatible values.

Complete

With the “Complete” criteria, Default variant values, selected variant values, rule required values are automatically populated. You can click on the variant to know the reason of selection. Suggested variant values can be accepted or changed as required. For the variants that do not have any rule, the first value in the list is automatically populated. This criteria aides in completing configuration with better agility.

This table provides a simplified view of the capabilities of each criteria within the rule deduced criteria: 

Please refer the following video that illustrates these capabilities.