Ontology-driven Requirements Elicitation in Product Configuration Systems

Abstract

Producing timely and customer-oriented products is a key factor for manufacturers‘ success in competing in the recent global economic era. Customer needs are becoming more complex as a result of rapid changes in social, technical, and economic conditions. Manufacturers must provide more flexibility and individual customizations of the products. This is not an easy task due to the different perspectives between manufacturer and customer during the pre-contract phase. Product configuration systems are generally used to improve the quotation process. However, it is still difficult to provide customer satisfying products because customers often cannot clearly articulate their requirements. This paper introduces an approach that assists the customer in articulating their requirements and supports the manufacturer to capture the customer needs completely. We propose an intelligent product configuration system that harmonizes both customer and manufacturer perspectives, based on an ontology-based integrated knowledge model. We utilize ontology-based methods and techniques to develop a recommender system in the product configuration system to improve the requirements elicitation and to avoid requirement inconsistencies.