Abstract
Manufacturers today compete to offer not only products, but products accompanied by services, which are referred to as product-service systems (PSSs). PSS mass customization is defined as the production of products and services to meet the needs of individual customers with near-mass-production efficiency. In the context of the PSS mass customization environment, customers are overwhelmed by a plethora of previously customized PSS variants. As a result, finding a PSS variant that is precisely aligned with the customer’s needs is a cognitive task that customers will be unable to manage effectively. In this paper, we propose a hybrid knowledge-based recommender system that assists customers in selecting previously customized PSS variants from a wide range of available ones. The recommender system (RS) utilizes ontologies for capturing customer requirements, as well as product-service and production-related knowledge. The RS follows a hybrid recommendation approach, in which the problem of selecting previously customized PSS variants is encoded as a constraint satisfaction problem (CSP), to filter out PSS variants that do not satisfy customer needs, and then uses a weighted utility function to rank the remaining PSS variants. Finally, the RS offers a list of ranked PSS variants that can be scrutinized by the customer. In this study, the proposed recommendation approach was applied to a real-life large-scale case study in the domain of laser machines. To ensure the applicability of the proposed RS, a web-based prototype system has been developed, realizing all the modules of the proposed RS.
Highlights
Accepted: 21 July 2021Today, manufacturers are seeking to meet their orders on demand via short-term networks, in which they are negotiating value-added processes
The comparison results show that our approach is free of the cold start and data sparsity issues as it generates recommendations based on the domain knowledge and explicit customer requirements
product-service systems (PSSs) variants with varying characteristics in order to meet the various needs of different customers
Summary
Manufacturers are seeking to meet their orders on demand via short-term networks, in which they are negotiating value-added processes. They try to take into account customer requirements, quality, price, sustainability, and other dimensions [1,2,3]. The most significant drawback is that PSSs remain at a conceptual level and lack IT implementation They do not fulfill the increasing user expectations or product diversity features to enable successful customization. They are unable to capture the views of different stakeholders to adapt product design to the customer’s demands in real-time. PSSs do not provide a holistic view of products and services, connecting the product structure to product quality, services, and production processes
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