Constraint-based personalised configuring of product and service bundles

Abstract

The configuring of product bundles such as tourism packages, financial services or compatible skin care products is a synthesis task that requires the support of a knowledgeable information system. We propose a personalised constraint-based configuration approach that is capable of solving such tasks in e-commerce environments. Here, a knowledge-based configurator is hybridised with collaborative methods from the domain of recommender systems in order to exploit user preferences to guide the problem solving process through large product spaces. The system implementation is based on a service-oriented architecture and the Choco open source constraint solver. It supports a model-driven approach for knowledge base design, acquisition and maintenance. An evaluation of the system suggests that it can solve realistic problem instances within an acceptable period of time.