Responsible Configuration Using LLM-based Sustainability-Aware Explanations

Configuration systems play an important role in achieving the sustainable development goals (SDGs) defined by the United Nations. As decision support systems, configurators help users to decide which components or features to include in or exclude from a configuration. An important task of configurators is the provision of explanations which help to achieve goals such as increasing configuration understandability, increasing a user’s trust, and persuading users/customers to include specific configuration components. Our goal in this paper is to introduce the concept of „sustainability-aware explanations “which can help to support the sustainable development goals. The type of explanations we propose in this context are somehow orthogonal to typical explanations used in industrial configuration environments. A major objective in this context is to follow a „less-is-more “principle focusing on different aspects of the idea of „responsible configuration “which refers to configuration techniques explicitly supporting the mentioned sustainability goals. We report the initial results of an evaluation that provide insights on potential impacts of the proposed explanations.