A Methodology for Supporting Product Selection from E-catalogues

This paper reports on going work to explore the role of electronic product catalogues in design management and new opportunities offered by e-commerce applications related to building product information in the construction industry. An approach based on the performance-concept in order to facilitate product selection from e-catalogues is described. In this approach product selection is facilitated by conducting predefined (virtual) experiments in which products from electronic product catalogues are ‘tested’ to determine their performance in a given design context. Performance indicators are used to rank the performance of product selected by the system.