Product Configuration on the Semantic Web Using Multi-Agent

With the rapid development of mass customization in e-business, online product configurator has become to be a new tool for product design. Current research efforts have been focusing on the provision of web interface to receive customer´s requirements about product structure. As the nature of html-encoded web information, these requirements are only human-understandable. The configurator is therefore just a product viewer for the customer without any reasoning logics. The emerging semantic Web has a huge potential to enrich web information with machine-understandable semantics. This paper discusses the technology of online product configuration on the Semantic Web. A four-layered framework named SW-PConf using multi-agent is presented. The SW-PConf consists of representation layer, ontology layer, model layer and service layer. In this framework, two ontologies (customer requirement ontology and product configuration ontology) are established to represent requirement knowledge and configuration knowledge respectively. Via a mapping between two ontologies, the automatic conversion from customer requirement knowledge to product configuration knowledge is achieved. The SW-PConf allows the customer to express product demands by using the natural language and returns the customer the optimal configuration results.