Applying generalized cases to retrieval and configuration of life insurance policies

Abstract

When searching for the right life insurance product, one can either confide in her/his insurance broker or use internet portal sites providing interactive assistance for finding suitable insurance products based on questionnaires. While the first alternative is risky, the second one is cumbersome because of many successive query formulations required. Since a single product is normally a tradeoff between customer requirements, the possibility of providing its priorities could speed up the search significantly. In this paper, we present an approach, which takes priorities in account, while searching for and configuring of insurance products. It makes use of Structural Case-Based-Reasoning (SCBR) extended by the concept of generalized cases. Here, each insurance product is represented as a generalized case what consequently allows the application of similarity assessment and retrieval techniques to the insurance domain. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.