Attribute selection for product configurator design based on Gini index

Abstract

Customer needs play a critical role in product design. Matching diversified customer needs with a company's product offerings has been a challenge for academia and industry. To this end, product configurator systems have been accepted as important tools to elicit customer needs to meet the challenge. However for complex products with many product possibilities and intricate inter-product relationships, current product configuration systems may become tedious and time consuming for customers' choice navigation process. They cannot adapt to each individual customer's preferences by leveraging on the attribute specification information captured in previous configuration steps. This paper presents a Gini index-based attribute selection approach for configurator design. Product configuring is modelled as a sequential query–answer process. In each configuring step, the Gini index is deployed to quantify the clarity of the designer's beliefs about the customer's needs. The attribute which contributes most to the clarity will be selected for the customer to configure. A product recommendation module is also integrated with the configurator to further improve the efficiency. As a result, designers obtain clarification on the customer's needs and preferences in an accelerated manner. An example is presented to test the viability of the method.