Review-driven configuration scheme evaluation methodology with configuration interaction effects

Abstract

This study focuses on configuration scheme evaluation (CSE) based on customer perceptions deduced from online reviews. It is noteworthy that customers in different market segments often hold significant differences in their perceptions of the same configuration. Meanwhile, there may exist a potential dependency relationship between configurations referred to as configuration interaction increasing the complexity of CSE. This paper proposes a review-driven interacting CSE methodology fusing with review texts and configuration documents to address these challenges. First, three indexes, namely configuration differentiation, price consistency, and usage scenario similarity, are defined to identify targeted segments. Second, a differentiated calculation strategy is designed to measure configuration performances based on the configuration data and review data in the identified segments. Third, a configuration performance aggregation function that considers configuration interaction is developed based on the Choquet integral. Finally, two CSE problem about car and laptop products is analyzed using the proposed methodology to verify its applicability. Three comparative studies are also conducted to show the effectiveness and stability of the proposals.