Product Configurator: An Ontological Approach

Mass customization is one of the most interesting and promising approach in the e-business field. In today's competitive global market the understanding of customer needs and desires is becoming the essential preliminary remark for a successful design and implementation of products. Product development based on customer preferences with applications of innovative technologies is an essential key in order to obtain a larger market share and faster sales growth. In this scenario a tool as the product configurator is becoming a real answer to one of most important question: how to organize product design to satisfy individual customer need without trading off cost-efficiency of mass production? This paper discusses a novel approach for the design of a smart product configurator. At this moment, in fact, the configurator is just a product viewer for the customer and does not implement any reasoning logics or user adaptive approach. So an ontology based approach is presented. In this methodology three ontologies are introduced: the customer needs ontology, the product functionalities ontology and the product configuration ontology. These ontologies represent the requirement and configuration knowledge that needs for a real customization of the product. The customer has to express his product demands by the use of natural language and by the mapping among the introduced ontologies and the use of a Bayesian Network approach the automatic conversion between customer needs and product configuration is achieved.