Customized purchase supporting expert system: UNIK-SES

An expert system that assists the customized men's wear purchasing process is developed. In the past, configuration systems have adopted either a rule- or a constraint-based representation. To overcome the limitation of the representation, an integrated representation of the Constraint and Rule Satisfaction Problems (CRSP) is adopted. Since the general purpose tool UNIK-CRSP provides concurrent, integrated and interactive reasoning, UNIK-CRSP is very suitable for assisting the personalized customer product configuration process in a natural manner. Using UNIK-CRSP, the domain-specific tool UNIK-SES is developed with the additional features of candidate products selection and user interfaces. This approach should be useful for customer support in electronic marketing on the information superhighway.