by Alexander Nöhrer, Alexander Egyed
Abstract:
The configuration of a product from a product line is a decision-making process that requires humans to answer questions. However, questions and their choices tend to affect one another (e. g., one feature depending on another) and decisions on how questions are answered may render other questions obsolete or reduce their choices. There is thus an ideal order in which questions should be answered to minimize the number of questions that need answering to completely configure a product. Unfortunately, this ideal order differs depending on the product - which cannot be known a priori. Decision-making is thus characterized by either imposing a predefined order on how questions must be answered (usually done manually by product line engineers) or not imposing any order. Both situations have downsides and this paper thus proposes an alternative: an incremental algorithm and tool-support for automatically optimizing the order of questions with every answer. We evaluated our approach on six models, the largest with over 280 questions, and found that the approach is 78-99% optimal and significantly reduces the number of questions that need to be answered manually. For the creators of product line models, this implies savings in not having to predefine the optimal order which is exponentially complex. For the configurator (decision maker) this implies more freedom in the order in which to answer questions while still benefiting from guidance.
Reference:
Optimizing User Guidance during Decision-Making. (Alexander Nöhrer, Alexander Egyed), In Proceedings of the14th International Conference (SPLC), Munich, Germany (Eduardo Santana de Almeida, Tomoji Kishi, Christa Schwanninger, Isabel John, Klaus Schmid, eds.), IEEE Computer Society, 2011.
Bibtex Entry:
@Conference{DBLP:conf/splc/NohrerE11,
author = {Alexander Nöhrer and Alexander Egyed},
title = {Optimizing User Guidance during Decision-Making.},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the14th International Conference (SPLC), Munich, Germany},
year = {2011},
editor = {Eduardo Santana de Almeida and Tomoji Kishi and Christa Schwanninger and Isabel John and Klaus Schmid},
pages = {25-34},
publisher = {IEEE Computer Society},
abstract = {The configuration of a product from a product line is a decision-making
process that requires humans to answer questions. However, questions
and their choices tend to affect one another (e. g., one feature
depending on another) and decisions on how questions are answered
may render other questions obsolete or reduce their choices. There
is thus an ideal order in which questions should be answered to minimize
the number of questions that need answering to completely configure
a product. Unfortunately, this ideal order differs depending on the
product - which cannot be known a priori. Decision-making is thus
characterized by either imposing a predefined order on how questions
must be answered (usually done manually by product line engineers)
or not imposing any order. Both situations have downsides and this
paper thus proposes an alternative: an incremental algorithm and
tool-support for automatically optimizing the order of questions
with every answer. We evaluated our approach on six models, the largest
with over 280 questions, and found that the approach is 78-99% optimal
and significantly reduces the number of questions that need to be
answered manually. For the creators of product line models, this
implies savings in not having to predefine the optimal order which
is exponentially complex. For the configurator (decision maker) this
implies more freedom in the order in which to answer questions while
still benefiting from guidance.},
doi = {10.1109/SPLC.2011.45},
file = {:Conferences\\SPLC 2011 - Optimizing User Guidance during Decision-Making\\Optimizing User Guidance during Decision Making-preprint.pdf:PDF},
keywords = {FWF P21321},
}