Evolving PC system hardware configurations

The task of determining proper configuration of a PC system may be very difficult for a customer having little knowledge about computer hardware components. Also, it becomes more and more difficult even for a specialist, (with time constraints) to determine the proper specification, because the market offers a wide variety of products to choose from. We represented this hardware configuration problem in the form of tree structures, where nodes represent all possible hardware components of a PC system. We then used structured genetic algorithms to solve this multi-level optimization problem. Accordingly, we developed a prototype system called Computer Hardware Designing System and successfully tested it on a number of empirical examples. © 2002 IEEE