Using fuzzy modeling for consistent definitions of product qualities in requirements

Companies increasingly rely on product differentiation and personalization strategies to provide their customers with an expansive catalog, and tools to assist them in finding the product meeting their needs. These tools include product search facilities, recommender systems, and product configurators. They typically represent a product as a set of features, which refer to a large number of technical specifications (e.g. size, weight, battery life). However, customers usually communicate and reason about products in terms of their qualities (e.g. ease-of-use, portability, ergonomics). In this paper, we tackle the problem of formalizing product qualities in the requirements of product-centred applications. Our goal is to extract product qualities from their technical features, so that customers can better perceive and evaluate the proposed products. To this end, we design a procedure for identifying segments of textual product documentation related to specific product qualities, and propose an approach based on fuzzy modeling to represent product qualities on top of technical specifications. Preliminary experiments we carried out on a catalog of cameras tend to show that fuzzy modeling is an appropriate formalism for representing product qualities. We also illustrate how modeled qualities can support the design of product configurators that are centered on the customers' needs.