Experiences from Deploying CBR Applications. in Electronic Commerce. Mario Lenz. Dept. of Computer Science, Humboldt University, D Berlin

Transcription

1 Experiences from Deploying CBR Applications in Electronic Commerce Mario Lenz Dept. of Computer Science, Humboldt University, D Berlin Abstract. Today, Electronic Commerce applications are among the most promising application areas of Case-Based Reasoning. When developing Electronic Commerce applications, very often technical issues are addressed very carefully, such as the particular implementation of the underlying CBR system. On the other hand, problems of system deployment sometimes are not paid sucient attention. In this article, we will discuss some of the major problems that occurred in one of our projects, and we will report the decisions taken to overcome these diculties. Keywords: Case-Based Reasoning, Electronic Commerce. 1 Introduction Due to the wide spread availability of the World Wide Web, a strong tendency can be observed to utilize this medium for commercial purposes. In principle, there are three dierent but related sub-areas of what is traditionally called Electronic Commerce (see also [5, 6]): Pre-Sales: A potential customer is provided with all required information about appropriate products or services. The most obvious way of supporting this stage of Electronic Commerce are electronic product catalogues as they are widely used throughout the WWW. Sales: Customer and sales agent negotiate about products and services, including prices, special discounts, delivery etc. [1, 2]. Usually this is a too complex process to be handled by traditional IT systems. After-Sales: When customers face problems with products or services they have bought before, they might need additional support for actually using the product. The simplest way of providing this is via web sites containing lists of Frequently Asked Questions or via special hotlines. In general, electronic marketplaces require special techniques in order for providing customers a real benet from using these rather than buying products in a traditional shop. The problems to be addressed include { availability of the system; { issues of security and authenticity; { matters of presentation, product selection, and customer support during all three phases of Electronic Commerce.

2 For the latter, techniques originating in Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) appear to be promising candidates. Successful Electronic Commerce applications utilizing CBR are, for example, the Virtual Travel Agency (see Section 2) or Analog Devices' online catalog 1. In this paper, we will, however, not so much go into technical details about those systems but rather address problems that arose during system deployment. In particular, we will report on some experiences obtained during design, implementation, and usage of the Virtual Travel Agency. We think that that these experiences might provide useful lessons for other projects in the area of Electronic Commerce applications. 2 The Virtual Travel Agency on the Internet 2.1 Motivation and Objectives Tourism seems to be a highly fruitful area for providing Internet-based services of all kinds. These services range from simple informative WWW pages to interactive applications allowing for online booking of ights, hotels, and tour packages. A wide variety of such applications exist; one of the most successful of these is the Virtual Travel Agency which has been developed in cooperation between Humboldt University and check out Touristik GmbH, a local travel agent in Berlin. The Virtual Travel Agency arose from a prototypical case-based reasoning system which originally aimed at demonstrating this paradigm in the travel domain. After some time, in particular with the growing availability of the World Wide Web, it became obvious that there was a true demand for such a system. Thus, a project was established with the objective of developing of a full-featured system based on the initially developed prototype. 2.2 Current State Up to now, a number of dierent components have been developed within the Virtual Travel Agency: { An Interactive Flight Kiosk maintains a database of up to 150,000 ights, including online booking facilities. { Two Interactive Last Minute Kiosks operate on the data of Neckermann respectively Berliner Flugring (BFR), two major German providers on the tourism market. { Recently, another Interactive Last Minute Kiosk has been released for Holiday Land, a major German association of travel agents with more than 200 oces throughout the country. { A Rent-A-Car application provides access to a world-wide operating car rental agency. 1

3 The web site also contains a lot of useful information and services, such as descriptions of hotels and of specic regions, overviews over climate and culture, etc. Thus, the Virtual Travel Agency tries to cover all major aspects which might be of interest for a potential customer. To implement some kind of intelligent behavior and to support the customer in particular during the Pre-Sales phase, techniques of Case-Based Reasoning have been applied (for details see [3, 6]). The core components of the application have been available since March 1997 and during the rst year approximately 1,000 bookings were performed. 2.3 Availability of the Virtual Travel Agency The systems are accessible via the home pages of our project partners at { { respectively { 3 Problems when Deploying the Virtual Travel Agency When developing the application, a number of problems had to be solved besides the technical aspects. Basically, these questions can be summarized as follows: 1. Is there a demand for such a product? Who actually wants such a system? 2. Who invests in system development? 3. Who runs and maintains the system, who provides data? We will address these questions in the following. While some of the discussed problems are of general interest, others may occur only in the travel domain which is special in so far as in virtually any sales process three parties get involved: the tour provider actually oering the product, the local travel agent acting as a broker only selling the product, and the customer who contacts the local travel agent. 3.1 Who wants an Electronic Commerce system? As mentioned in the Introduction, tourism applications are among the fastest growing on the World Wide Web. So, obviously, there is a true demand from the customers' side. The situation is, however, dierent with the travel agents who act as sales men for the products oered by tour providers. In fact, there is a certain fear that WWW-based applications might take away market shares and thus further reduce the turnover of traditional travel agents { probably resulting in severe nancial problems of local travel agents. In contrast to this general tendency, there are some travel agents, however, who are very active in this market and try to build up systems on the web. Mainly, these are fairly new companies who,

4 by utilizing the WWW, try to make their services available throughout Germany and thus to increase their market share. As a consequence, most tourism applications on the web are provided by minor agents rather than the major companies. With the tour providers, the situation is even more complicated. On the one hand, these recognize the potential which lies in using Internet technology. Also, they are afraid of losing market shares if acting too late. On the other hand, they do not want to lose local travel agents as their distributors { which might be the case if tour providers show too much engagement in the new markets. Consequently, it is dicult to get into contact with major tour providers and, in particular, to get their agreement for publishing details about their engagement in the projects. 3.2 Who invests in system development? Once a decision has been made to build an Electronic Commerce system, the matter of nancing arises; that is, who is willing to invest in the development of such a system. Again, the situation seems to be special in the travel domain. On the one hand, there are major tour providers which, undoubtedly, would be able to provide a certain budget. However, these companies argue, that (a) they already give commission to the travel agents for selling ights, tour packages and such. This is assumed to include sales processes via the Internet { the tour providers simply don't care how their products are being sold. (b) the total turnover will hardly increase by using an Internet based system. Rather, some products will be sold via Electronic Commerce systems which otherwise could be sold in a more traditional way. On the other hand, local travel agents obviously benet from (successful) applications in that they are able to open new markets and thus to increase their market share. However, the commission they get for selling products hardly suf- ces for covering the usual costs. So there is hardly any budget left for investing in the development of new systems. Finally, there are the customers who, of course, are not willing to pay an additional fee for using modern Internet technology. Rather, they see that there is a certain amount of atomization and self-service { so the products should be even cheaper than in the travel oces around the corner. Consequently, nancing may become a severe problem when developing an Electronic Commerce application in that area. Note also, that this does not only concern the development of an application but also the actual usage. In particular, costs arising from using Internet services should not be under-estimated. 3.3 Who runs the system? A nal question that has to be answered is, who will be running the system. Obviously, there seem to be three alternatives:

5 Firstly, the tour providers themselves might oer access to their products via WWW sites and Electronic Commerce applications. In fact, some of companies are very active in this direction (see and However, this results in problems with local travel agents, as discussed above. Also, tour providers thus move in completely new areas as they have not been selling their products before but assigned this task to the travel agents. Consequently, the question arises whether the EC solutions provided are of sucient quality and meet the customers' demands. Secondly, a local travel agent could take the responsibility of such a system. Obviously, this has the major advantage that the agent is already active in the market. They know the domain and are also able to provide additional services not yet provided by the EC system (such as car rental in addition to a tour package). A further advantage is that they already have access to the data of the tour providers, so there are fewer problems in utilizing this data in an Internet based system. Thirdly, one might think of some new company, e.g. some software house, running such an application. However, here severe problems arise as they do not know the market, they are hardly able to provide more than a core functionality and service, and they will run into diculties getting access to the data of tour providers. 4 Decisions for the Virtual Travel Agency In the following, we will briey describe the decision made for the Virtual Travel Agency which probably contributed very much to the success of this application. System Demand: Fortunately, we had been in contact with a local travel agent, check out at a very early stage of the project. Based on the prototypical system mention in the introduction, they expressed their interest and developing and deploying such an application. A further advantage has been to initially focus on selling Last Minute tour packages. In this market segment, several hundred oers have to be dealt with every day { which is, of course, not possible without computer support. Development Costs: During system development, a number of problems had to be solved which still address research issues. Thus, we were able to develop the system with a minimum budget only covering some expenses, such as salaries for students. Also, all non-programming tasks, such as web design, were performed by check out themselves { which again kept the budget low. Running the System: The Virtual Travel Agency is now run by check out themselves. They have their own WWW sites and take care that the data is always up-to-date. As discussed above, this has the major advantage that they can make use of their know how of the market. Of course, for further improvements and extensions of the system which require implementation eort, man power of computer scientists is required and, thus, further projects have to be agreed upon.

6 5 Summary In this paper, we have reported some experiences we obtained from performing a successful Electronic Commerce project in the tourism domain. Rather than going into the technical details, we focussed very much on problems of systems deployment. As the success of the Virtual Travel Agency shows, there are ways to overcome these diculties which, however, require new types of cooperations such that all participating parties may benet from the success of the project. Acknowledgments The author wants to thank all the people who have been involved in the Electronic Commerce projects at Humboldt University Berlin, in particular Andre Hubner and Alexander Auerbach. References 1. C. Beam and A. Segev. Electronic catalogs and negotiations. CITM Working Paper 96-WP-1016, Fisher Center for Information Technology and Managment, University of California, Berkely, August Available at citm/negoproj.html. 2. C. Beam and A. Segev. Automated negotiations: A survey of the state of the art. CITM Working Paper, Fisher Center for Information Technology and Managment, University of California, Berkely, M. Lenz. Case-based reasoning for holiday planning. In W. Schertler, B. Schmid, A. M. Tjoa, and H. Werthner, editors, Information and Communications Technologies in Tourism, pages 126{132. Springer Verlag, M. Lenz, H.-D. Burkhard, B. Bartsch-Sporl, and S. Wess. Case-Based Reasoning Technology { From Foundations to Applications. Lecture Notes in Articial Intelligence Springer Verlag, W. Wilke. Case-based reasoning and electronic commerce. Invited Talk at ICCBR- 97, W. Wilke, M. Lenz, and S. Wess. Intelligent Sales Support with CBR. In Case- Based Reasoning Technology { From Foundations to Applications [4], chapter 4, pages 91{114.