Abstract
Mass customization refers to the increase in variety and customization of the manufactured products and services. It is now economically feasible thanks to the availability of computer-aided manufacturing systems, which allow people to customize standard products, and to Internet, through which many online retailers now operate, thus eliminating the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution that, in past years, prevented the production of niche products because of their high production costs. To permit mass customization, several software-based product configurators are available on the Web: they guide people in adapting a product to their needs and desires. A drawback of such configurators is the limited range of changes permitted. We present in this paper a system that gives people more freedom in creating products that best fit their desires, thanks to the use of an ontology, which models the possible product compositions that users can perform. The proposed solution is shown through a case study, which refers to furniture production.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Simpson, T.W.: Product Platform Design and Customization: Status and Promise. Artif. Intell. Eng. Des. Anal. Manuf. 18(1), 3–20 (2004)
Chase, R.B., Jacobs, F.R., Aquilano, N.J.: Operations Management for Competitive Advantage, 11th edn. McGraw-Hill/Irwin, New York (2005)
Pine II, B.J.: Mass Customization: The New Frontier in Business Competition. Harvard Business School Press, Boston (1993)
Zhang, X., Yang, Y., Liu, S., Liu, F.: Realization of a Development Platform for Web-Based Product Customization Systems. Int. J. Comput. Integr. Manuf. 20(2-3), 254–264 (2007)
Zha, X.F., Sriram, R.D., Lu, W.F.: Evaluation and Selection in Product Design for Mass Customization: A Knowledge Decision Support Approach. Artif. Intell. Eng. Des. Anal. Manuf. 18(1), 87–109 (2004)
Franke, N., Schreier, M., Kaiser, U.: The “I Designed It Myself” Effect in Mass Customization. Management Science 56(1), 125–140 (2009)
IKEA: Ikea, http://www.ikea.com/ (last access on December 26, 2010)
NIKEiD: Nikeid, http://nikeid.nike.com/nikeid/ (last access on December 26, 2010)
Trentin, A., Perin, E., Forza, C.: Overcoming the Customization-Responsiveness Squeeze by Using Product Configurators: Beyond Anecdotal Evidence. Computers in Industry 62(3), 260–268 (2011)
Costabile, M.F., Fogli, D., Fresta, G., Mussio, P., Piccinno, A.: Building Environments for End-User Development and Tailoring. In: IEEE Symposium on Human Centric Computing Languages and Environments, pp. 31–38. IEEE Computer Society, Auckland (2003)
Costabile, M.F., Fogli, D., Mussio, P., Piccinno, A.: Visual Interactive Systems for End-User Development: A Model-Based Design Methodology. IEEE T. Syst. Man Cy. A 37(6), 1029–1046 (2007)
Anderson, C.: The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More. Hyperion, New York (2006)
Amazon: Amazon.Com, http://www.amazon.com/ (last access on December 26, 2010)
Oh, Y., Gross, M.D., Ishizaki, S., Yi-Luen Do, E.: A Constraint-Based Furniture Design Critic. Research and Practice in Technology Enhanced Learning (RPTEL) 5(2), 97–122 (2010)
Thomas, J.C., Kellogg, W.A., Erickson, T.: The Knowledge Management Puzzle: Human and Social Factors in Knowledge Management. IBM Syst. J. 40(4), 863–884 (2001)
Wexler, M.N.: The Who, What and Why of Knowledge Mapping. Journal of Knowledge Management 5(3), 249–263 (2001)
Lenzerini, M.: Data Integration: A Theoretical Perspective. In: 21st ACM SIGMOD-SIGACT-SIGART Symposium on Principles of Database Systems (PODS 2002), pp. 233–246. ACM Press, Madison (2002)
Valtolina, S.: Design of Knowledge Driven Interfacesin Cultural Contexts. International Journal on Semantic Computing 5(3), 525–553 (2008)
Wielinga, B.J., Schreiber, A.T., Wielemaker, J., Sandberg, J.A.C.: From Thesaurus to Ontology. In: K-CAP 2001, pp. 194–201. ACM Press, Victoria (2001)
Junhua, W., Fenghu, W., Weihong, S.: Knowledge Ontology Based Management System of Furniture Design. In: International Forum on Computer Science-Technology and Applications (IFCSTA 2009), pp. 282–285. IEEE Computer Society, Chongqing (2009)
Costabile, M.F., Fogli, D., Mussio, P., Piccinno, A.: End-User Development: The Software Shaping Workshop Approach. In: Lieberman, H., Paternò, F., Wulf, V. (eds.) End User Development, vol. 9, pp. 183–205. Springer, Dordrecht (2006)
Lieberman, H., Paternò, F., Wulf, V. (eds.): End User Development, vol. 9. Springer, Dordrecht (2006)
Sutcliffe, A., Mehandjiev, N.: Introduction Special Issue: End-User Development. Communications of the ACM 47(9), 31–32 (2004)
Fischer, G., Giaccardi, E., Ye, Y., Sutcliffe, A., Mehandjiev, N.: Meta-Design: A Manifesto for End-User Development. Communications of the ACM 47(9), 33–37 (2004)
Protégé user documentation: Protégé User Documentation, http://protege.stanford.edu/doc/users.html (last access on December 26, 2010)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Ardito, C. et al. (2011). An Ontology-Based Approach to Product Customization. In: Costabile, M.F., Dittrich, Y., Fischer, G., Piccinno, A. (eds) End-User Development. IS-EUD 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6654. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21530-8_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21530-8_9
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-21529-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-21530-8
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)