An introduction to personalization and mass customization

Mass customization as a state-of-the-art production paradigm aims to produce individualized, highly variant products and services with nearly mass production costs. A major side-effect for companies providing complex products and services is that customers quite often get confused by the high variety and do not make a purchase. Personalization technologies can help to alleviate the challenges of mass customization. These technologies support customers in specifying products and services that fit their wishes and needs in a fashion where decision and interaction efforts with sales support systems are significantly reduced. We provide a short overview of related research and the articles that are part of this special issue on Personalization and Mass Customization.Peer reviewe

Installed base information utilisation in industrial service development and operations

This paper describes a systematic literature review conducted to determine how installed base information (IBI) is utilised in developing and operating industrial services. We found that the reviewed literature considers IBI useful and relevant for industrial service operations, and that it is mainly used to improve service quality and efficiency. However, it is evident that there is a shortage of empirical studies and further investigations that show concrete applications of IBI in different service activities. The existing research concentrates on particular contexts, such as preventive maintenance and asset management. The asset owner perspective is emphasised in the literature, but the use of IBI for service offerings, service contracts and service sales is rarely discussed. The literature indicates that many companies lack a holistic approach to IBI management, in general, and utilisation as a part of it. It is not uncommon for companies to build large databases, but fail to do accurate analyses based on the collected data.Peer reviewe

Generating Configuration Models from Requirements to Assist in Product Management : Dependency Engine and its Performance Assessment

Requirements engineering is often, especially in the context of major open source software projects, performed with issue tracking systems such as Jira or Bugzilla. Issues include requirements expressed as bug reports, feature requests, etc. Such systems are at their best at managing individual requirements life-cycle. The management of dependencies between issues and holistic analysis of the whole product or a release plan is usually scantly supported. Feature modeling is an established way to represent dependencies between individual features, especially in the context of Software Product Lines — well-researched feature model analysis and configuration techniques exist. We developed a proof-of-concept dependency engine for holistically managing requirements. It is based on automatically mapping requirements and their dependencies into a variant of feature models, enabling utilization of existing research. The feature models are further mapped into a constraint satisfaction problem. The user can experiment with different configurations of requirements. The system maintains the consistency of dependencies and resource constraints. To evaluate the feasibility of the system, we measure the performance of the system both with some real and generated requirements. Despite some remaining performance issues, it seems that the approach can scale into managing the requirements of large software projects.Peer reviewe

Inteligent, community-driven requirements engineering (Poster)

Researchers from University of Helsinki are working on intelligent, open-source requirements management platform with decision-support capabilities. This poster presents the planned research approach and expected deliverables.Peer reviewe