Creating Competitive Products

The importance of dominance and skyline analysis has been well recognized in multi-criteria decision making applications. Most previous works study how to help customers find a set of “best” possible products from a pool of given products. In this paper, we identify an interesting problem, creating competitive products, which has not been studied before. Given a set of products in the existing market, we want to study how to create a set of “best” possible products such that the newly created products are not dominated by the products in the existing market. We refer such products as competitive products. A straightforward solution is to generate a set of all possible products and check for dominance relationships. However, the whole set is quite large. In this paper, we propose a solution to generate a subset of this set effectively. An extensive performance study using both synthetic and real datasets is reported to verify its effectiveness and efficiency.