Four-worlds model for configurable services

Configurable products are one way to pursue mass customisation. Configurators are information systems that support the repetitive specification of product variants and description of all possible product variants of a configurable product in a configuration model, Configuration models are expressed using concepts and their relationships defined in the conceptual model underlying the configurator. Many different conceptual models exist and there is no dominant approach. The conceptual model significantly affects ease of modelling, understandability, compactness and expressiveness of configuration models as well as computational complexity of computer support. In this paper we present a conceptual model, or conceptualisation, for modelling configurable services, an area with relatively little previous research, based on a synthesis of previous work extended with our own experiences with four case companies.

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