Personalising On-Line Configuration of Products and Services

The sales of complex configurable products and services on the Web is challenged by the large number of technical details to be specified during the configuration process and by the fact that the customer base has heterogeneous requirements and knowledge about the items to be configured. Effective personalisation strategies are thus critical to the development of successful Web-based configuration systems. This paper presents a framework for the management of personalised configuration in business-oriented domains. The main goal is to assist the user during the configuration task by suggesting suitable choices and providing her\footnote{We refer to the user in a unique gender for readability purposes.} with information about the products/services to be configured. Our framework integrates user modelling and personalisation techniques with constraint-based configuration techniques and is applied within the CAWICOMS prototype toolkit for the development of adaptive Web-based configuration systems.