Applying Recursive CBR for the Customization of Structured Products in an Electronic Shop

When applying CBR for Electronic Commerce, the adaptation capabilities of CBR can be used for product customization. Most adaptation techniques suuer from the problem that they require a large knowledge acquisition eeort which leads to problems in the rapidly changing E-Commerce scenario. In this paper we present a new approach to adaptation that is particularly suited to Electronic Commerce applications. It assumes that products can be structured hierarchically into sub-components. Adaptation is achieved by incrementally replacing unsuitable sub-components through recursively applying CBR to nd best-matching alternative sub-components. The presented approach avoids huge portions of the knowledge acquisition eeort and is prototypically implemented as an extension of the CBR-Works tool.