Interactive Visualisation of Products in Web Configurators

Open Postdoc position (1,5 years)

We are looking for a candidate holding a PhD in computer science. The candidate should have an expertise in Web development, ideally with a background in variability, product lines, and configurable systems.

Contacts: Mathieu Acher (mathieu.acher@irisa.fr), Benoit Baudry (benoit.baudry@inria.fr)

Keywords: Web configurators, Web development, domain-specific languages, variability management, software product lines

Description

Numerous companies develop interactive Web configurators to assist users in customising sales products through the selection of configuration options. A visual representation of these products is an important factor in terms of user experience. However, an analysis of 100+ existing Web configurators highlights that not all provide visual representations of configured products [1, 2]. One of the current challenges is the trade-off developers face between (1) either the memory consuming use of pre-generated images of all the combinations of options, or (2) rendering products on the fly, which is non trivial to implement efficiently, especially in a Web setting. We believe that a new approach to associate product configurations to visual representations is needed to compose and render them dynamically. The objective is to define the theoretical foundations and develop the tooling support for effectively building Web configurators with product visualization capabilities. The comprehensive solution, based on state-of-the-art Web and configuration techniques, will be integrated into the Web environment of FAMILIAR [3, 4]. An evaluation of the proposal will be performed in the context of industrial projects. The candidate will have the opportunity to lead the project, including direct interactions with industrial partners as well as the management of engineers and PhD students.

References

Working Environment

The postdoc candidate will work at Inria in the DiverSE team. DiverSE’s research objective is to compose and synthesize software diversity from design to runtime. The team is actively involved in European, French and industrial projects and is composed of 8 faculty members, 16 PhD students, 6 post-docs and 4 engineers. The position is already open and applications will be reviewed until the position is filled in September 2014. The monthly net salary is 2100 euros and the contract is for 18 months.

Position: FILLED

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