Intelligent Agents for Negotiation and Recommendation in Mass Customization

Mass customization, as a means to meet individual consumer’s need on a large scale, has recently attracted the attention of both researchers and practitioners. However, as customers and their needs grow increasingly diverse, meeting every consumer’s need has become a surefire way to add unnecessary cost and complexity to operations. Furthermore, consumers are not all really ready for mass customization. They have to face inconveniences such as expensive price, delay delivery and they have to spend time “designing” their product. In order to solve this problem, we proposed a way of intelligent agent assisted negotiation and recommendation. The recommendation is a preference elicitation process, while the negotiation is a communication process based on the situation of manufacturer, such as the inventory level, production cost and lead time. With the aid of intelligent agent of negotiation and recommendation, a good balance between efficiency and customer satisfactions of mass customization can be reached.