In today's competitive environment, manufacturing and service companies are intensifying their customization processes. Customization means companies must meet the challenge of providing individualized products and services, without introducing high costs. Therefore, companies must address both customization and cost factors to gain a competitive advantage. While product customization is the manufacturing of products according to individual customer needs, it does not involve any focus on the cost perspective. Information and Management Systems for Product Customization will concentrate on both product customization and costs' efficiency, which is termed as mass customization. Moreover, mass customization with its multi-dimensions is the new business paradigm challenging today's manufacturing companies.

"This book describes original, innovative works on IT systems for mass customization, and provides a multitude of solutions, tools, concepts and successful realizations of IT systems for mass customization. It discusses state-of-the-art mass customization while depicting the importance of IT in making the strategy function efficiently in order to support the business processes required for manufacturing individualized products"--Provided by publisher.

Successfully managed product information for mass customization avoids disclosure of how these systems work. This is the first book to provide a holistic recognition of the essential aspects of an IT-supported product configuration system. It reveals the basic building blocks of these systems and their operational and strategic implications.

Provides a review of current and potential research in green management and control.

"This book focuses on the customization of services and communication environments to advance user satisfaction--Provided by publisher.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 20th International Symposium on Methodologies for Intelligent Systems, ISMIS 2012, held in Macau, China, in December 2012. The 42 regular papers and 11 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 88 submissions. They are organized in topical sections named: knowledge discovery and data mining; intelligent information systems; text mining and language processing; knowledge representation and integration; music information retrieval; recommender systems; technology intelligence and applications; product configuration; human factors in information retrieval; social recommender systems; and warehousing and OLAPing complex, spatial and spatio-temporal data.