An interactive service customization model

Mass customization has become one of the key strategies for a service provider to differentiate itself from its competitors in a highly segmented global service market. This paper proposes an interactive service customization model to support individual service offering for customers. In this model, not only that the content of an activity is customizable, but the process model can also be constructed dynamically according to the customer's requirements. Based on goal ontology, the on-demand customer requirements are transformed into a high-level service process model. Process components, which are building blocks for reusable standardized service processes, are designed to support on-demand process composition. The customer can incrementally define the customized service process through a series of operations, including activation of goal decomposition, reusable component selection, and process composition. In this paper, we first discuss the key requirements of the service customization problem. We then present in detail a knowledge-based customizable service process model and the accompanying customization method. Finally we demonstrate the feasibility of the our approach through a case study of the well-known travel planning problem and present a prototype system that enables users to interactively organize a satisfying travel plan.