A fuzzy constraint satisfaction approach for electronic shopping assistance

摘要

The Internet and World Wide Web offer an additional channel for consumers to find, select, and buy products. However, unlike shopping in the traditional store, consumers have no direct contact with human clerks to get the required information in the electronic store. The objective of this paper is to propose a fuzzy constraint satisfaction approach to help buyers find fully satisfactory or replacement products in electronic shopping. For the buyer who can give precise product requirements, the proposed approach can generate product-ranking lists based on the satisfaction degrees of each product to the given requirements. For the buyer who may not input accurate requirements, a similarity analysis approach is proposed to assess buyer requirements automatically during his browsing process. The proposed approach could help buyers find the preferred products on the top of the ranking list without further searching the remaining pages. The experimental results show the applicability of the proposed approach for electronic shopping assistance.