Improving product configurators by means of a collaborative recommender system

More and more companies are starting to offer individualised products and services to their customers. A customer can create his own product by choosing different product options. This process is, however, often problematic and confusing for new customers, as they typically need in-depth knowledge of the product they want to buy. This paper proposes the use of a collaborative recommender system to calculate the most common product options and recommend these options to a customer during the design process. The presented approach can be integrated into the existing product configurators.