On service-enhanced product recommendation Guiding users through complex product specification

Complex service-enhanced products such as solar power plants and intelligent buildings are one-of-a-kind and highly customized by nature. As such on one hand the specification of their sub-products and services involve a wide variety of competitive/cooperative stakeholders and on the other hand through different stages of their long life cycle, these specification are generated in different sessions and go through many iterations. These characteristics of complex products make the process of specifying their components difficult and time-consuming. We have previously defined the tools for specification of both sub-products and their enhancing services related to complex products [1], [2]. In this paper we introduce an approach for the use of a recommender system to assist designers of sub-products with reusing the existing specifications, as well as for recommending business services that can enhance the defined sub-products. Considering that multitudinous (hundreds to thousands) components present in complex products, their specifications cannot be accomplished without proper reuse of related existing specifications in the system, shared by different stakeholders. The introduced recommender system assists designers with their specification of new components, using the previously specified components in the system, and discovers/ranks those similar components, while matching the preferences and requirements set by the users.