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COOM documentation

For a more complete documentation to the COOM language we refer to the official website.

In the following we give an overview of the three COOM language fragments as described in Baumeister et al., 2025.

These fragments have similar counterparts in the COOM language profiles from the official documentation. However, they might differ in some details.

J. Baumeister, S. Hahn, K. Herud, M. Ostrowski, J. Reutelshöfer, N. Rühling, T. Schaub, P. Wanko. Towards Industrial-scale Product Configuration. CoRR, abs/2504.00013, 2025. doi: 10.48550/arXiv.2504.00013. URL https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.00013.

COOM Core

This is the basic language fragment which contains the most essential language features.

It corresponds to the CORE profile of the language profiles.

Configuration tree / Product hierarchy

  • The configuration has a root which is specified by the product keyword which in turn can have features with a fixed cardinality of 1.
  • The only features allowed are enumeration[s] which can have attribute[s].

Constraints

  • Constraints are specified by the behavior keyword
  • The possible constraints are:
    • require (not nested)
    • require with single condition (not nested)
  • Formulas can be specified by using the following operators:
    • Binary comparison: =, !=, <, <=, >, >=
    • Unary logical: !, ()
    • Binary logical: ||, &&
    • Example: require ! (color = Red && size = XXL)
  • Further, table constraints are allowed by using the combinations keyword:
    • The entries of the table can be formed by using allow keyword
    • The forbid keyword is currently not permitted
    • Table entries can be single values, tuples or a wildcard -*-

COOM[P]

COOM[P] extends COOM core by the following. This extension corresponds to the C-USER profile.

Configuration tree / Product hierarchy

  • Features can have cardinalities (0..1 Basket basket) but these have to be bounded
  • Features can also be structure (which builds up a partonomy)

Constraints

  • Constraints can be specified locally for a structure, eg. behavior Bag {...}
  • This enables longer path expressions, eg. carrier.bag.capacity.volume

COOM[X]

COOM[X] extends COOM[P] by the following. This extension corresponds to the N-LIN profile.

Configuration tree / Product hierarchy

  • Features can be numeric, eg. num .#/g 1-10000 totalWeight with their range specified or left open (only for flingo).

Constraints

  • Formulas can now be built using
  • Aggregate functions (count, sum, min, max)
  • Arithmetics
    • Unary: (), +, -
    • Binary: +, -, *
    • no support yet for / and ^
    • flingo only supports linear calculations (no multiplication of two variables)

Unbounded Cardinalities

The fragments COOM[P] and COOM[X], respectively, have extensions which allow for unbounded cardinalities (e.g. 0..*). This extension corresponds to the C-OPEN profile.

We call these fragments COOM[P*] and COOM[X*], respectively.