A generic and extensible information infrastructure framework for mass-customizing platform products

Abstract

This paper discusses the design and development of an information infrastructure for customizing platform products on a mass scale. The resulting framework provides a technology forum for the Mass Customization (MC) and Platform Product Development (PPD) communities to deploy their most advanced tools and techniques as online services, in order to enable and facilitate meaningful interoperability of information and knowledge management. The design and development have been based on MC concepts and latest Information Technology constructs. A special language, ppXML, is derived from XML for modelling platform products, such that different PPD and MC Web services can exchange the information in the common language. prdUDDI and mcPortal provide useful facilities for different groups of users to register, deploy, search and activate their PPD and MC services with the portal. A case study on applying a platform product customization (PPc) Web service is presented to demonstrate how the portal is utilized and to identify what features are important to the users.

Keywords:

• Platform product development
• Mass customization
• UDDI
• Web services
• ppXML

Acknowledgements

The authors are most grateful to Mr Ting Qu for his efforts and support in implementing the prdUDDI. The authors are also grateful to Hong Kong University Research Committee for partial financial support for this research.