Mass customization of shoes by automatically finding best-fitting shoes

How to meet the technological challenges of designing customized products? Typical customer products, such as shoes, seem to have a simple product structure and a quite low level of complexity. At least if one considers products, such as cars or airplanes. Modern truck factories customize and manufacture trucks, just in time and without being one truck similar to the other. How about shoes? Shoes have a simple product structure; approximately 10 or 20 parts, compared to 6000 parts in a car. Where are the difficulties, if not the number and the structure of its parts? One answer to this question is, that the complexity of a shoe, which is customized for a specific foot is hidden in its micro structure. The micro structure is the structure where the elements and their relationships are not parts as in typical product structures but single building blocks which together with their relationships determine the customer requirements. Designing customized shoes is a knowledge intensive process. To meet customer requirements and the challenge of knowledge intensive design processes for customized products new technological concepts are necessary. The EUROShoE project aims at realizing an Extended User Oriented Shoe Enterprise. And here, the individual shoe design to fulfill individual style, functional and comfort needs,