Up until now e-commerce is primarily focused on the trading of simple goods and services, where products can be described either by price alone or as a set of attributes. There is little support for trading complex configurable products, such as computer systems, automobiles, insurances and services in general. Companies want to communicate offers including complex rules and business policies, and they need decision support to evaluate these offers. This paper describes ECCO, a decision analysis methodology to evaluate configurable offers. Configurable offers allow multiple options for each attribute and they include rules on how to combine the various attribute values. These offers exhibit some combinatorial aspects. With only 10 attributes and 5 possible attribute values for each of them, one can generate almost 10 million possible configurations. ECCO helps a user to select the best out of all possible configurations based on a user’s preferences. We draw on mathematical programming and conventional decision analysis techniques. We also introduce CPML, an XML schema for describing configurable offers in a compact way, and outline possible application scenarios, as well as a concrete implementation of the methodology in an e-marketplace environment.
By: Martin Bichler, Jayant R. Kalagnanam, Ho Soo Lee
Published in: RC22288 in 2002
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