Towards recommending configurable offerings

Configuration technologies provide a solid basis for the implementation of a mass customisation strategy. A side-effect of this strategy is that the offering of highly variant products and services triggers the phenomenon of mass confusion, i.e., customers are overwhelmed by the size and complexity of the offered assortments. In this context, recommendation technologies can provide help by supporting users in the identification of products and services fitting their wishes and needs. Recommendation technologies have been intensively exploited for the recommendation of simple products such as books or movies but have (with a few exceptions) not been applied to the recommendation of complex products and services such as computers or financial services. In this paper, we provide an overview of existing approaches to the integration of configuration and recommendation technologies, propose extensions and indicate directions of future work.