A Three-stage Methodology for Design Evaluation in Product Development

In order to remain competitive in today?s technologically driven world, the faster and more efficient development of innovative products has become the focus for manufacturing companies. In tandem with this, design evaluation plays a critical role in the early phases of product development, because it has significant impact on the downstream development processes as well as on the success of the product being developed. Owing to the pressure of primary factors, such as customer expectations, technical specifications and cost and time constraints, designers have to adopt various techniques for evaluating design alternatives in order to make the right decisions as early as possible. In this work, a novel three-stage methodology for design evaluation has been developed. The preliminary stage screens all the criteria from different viewpoints using House of Quality (HoQ). The second stage uses a Fuzzy-Analytical Hierarchy Process (Fuzzy-AHP) to obtain the alternatives weighting and the final stage verifies the ranking of the alternatives by a Rough-Grey Analysis. This method will enable designers to make better-informed decisions before finalising their choice. A case example from industry are presented to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed methodology. The result of the example shows that the integration of Fuzzy-AHP with HoQ and Rough-Grey Analysis provides a novel alternative to existing methods of design evaluation.