User:Peter C Matthews 1962/Tacton Systems

Tacton Systems Founded in March 1998, Tacton Systems AB is a spin-off from the Swedish Institute of Computer Science, where development of Tacton Configurator began in 1992, preceded by many years of research and application in knowledge based systems, logic programming, and configuration. The founders of Tacton spent many years carrying out applied research looking at the needs of manufacturing businesses and realised configuration was one of the most pressing challenges. During this research period the research team investigated the many different approaches to solving configuration problems a path which led them towards Artifical Intelligence.

Tacton Configurator is the result of research and development in the ISL, Intelligent Systems Laboratory within SICS, where the configurator was called Obelics. Domains to be mentioned are logic programming and constraints programming. The powerful and efficient programming systems SICStus Prolog and Oz, have been the enabling tools for the Obelics development.

In 1996 Dr Klas Orsvärn defended his thesis on ‘Knowledge Modelling with Libraries of Task Decomposition Methods’ and led the move to create the commercial spion-off.

The Tacton Configurator is a highly refined and extremely powerful generic off-the-shelf software design engineered to work with any other application. The configurator is adapted by creating a product configuration model and by connecting it to other relevant software usch as an ERP, CRM, PLM, CAD e-commerce or other system. The model is built by using a component oriented modelling language to describe configurable and fixed components at all levels as well as the properties of the components. Also the conditions for configuration has to be described in the model, as well as the parameters of customer requirements which are used to drive the end-user dialogue.

Tacton (2011) is now deployed by a wide number of industrials globally who use it to improve business performance such as reduce the time and cost to quote for configurable products through to companies who use Tacton inside their CAD systems (such as SolidWorks or Inventor) to automate their design for configurable products.

Together with his colleague Tomas Axling, Dr Klas Orsvärn is a regular contributor to the activities of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.

Corporate
Tacton Systems is a privately owned company registered in Sweden.