A Service-Oriented Approach for the Optimal Product/Service Design Business Process

Abstract

The optimal product design is an NP-hard marketing optimization problem, in which a firm aims at the maximization of its market share or profit. A manager that deals with the problem has to decide on a number of issues, such as how to simulate the consumer choice process, which optimization algorithm to apply, and how to model the competitors’ retaliatory moves. The existing information systems fail to provide the decision maker with the unique blend of techniques and resources required by the problem. In order to follow the way that marketing managers comprehend the optimal product process, in this paper the problem is broken down into distinct services, each one of them maps into a basic feature (simulation, optimization, competition analysis, etc.). All services are aggregated to a marketing decision support system by a service oriented architecture, achieving this way a decision-makers friendly environment, since the marketing managers are able to get a solution without the need to transfer data and parameters from one software to another, and without the need to coordinate manually the whole process.