Finding All Competitive Products Using the Dominant Relationship Analysis

The importance of skyline and dominance relationship analysis has been well recognized in multicriteria decision-making applications. In this paper, we propose the problem of "Finding Skyline with Customer Preferences and Cost Constraints", which utilizes the concept of dominance for business analysis from a microeconomic perspective. Our problem aims to discover the dominance relationship between products and potential customers. Given a set of customer preferences, we want to help the company to design set of competitive products so that the products can satisfy as many customer requirements as possible and the cost of producing the products is within a specified threshold. By "competitive products" we mean that the products cannot be dominated by other products in the market. We formally define the problem and discuss the difficulty of the problem. We also present the foundation and the intuition of our pruning methods. Then we proposed three efficient algorithms that utilize our pruning methods to address the problem. In addition, we also prove the correctness of our proposed algorithms.