A case-based reasoning approach toward developing a belief about the cost of concept

Abstract

It is generally acknowledged that product development involves a sequence of decision making under uncertainty, including setting target requirements for a new product, selecting product concept, and developing conceptual and detailed design of a chosen concept. To select a product concept, engineers need to assess the uncertainty of a future market share, market size, and a cost of concept (cost of the final product developed from a concept). This paper proposes a case-based reasoning (CBR) approach to model beliefs about the uncertainty of a cost of concept. The proposed CBR approach consists of storing information about various products in a knowledge-base, defining a new product concept, retrieving a cluster of products in the knowledge-base that are highly similar to the concept, and adapting the cost of the retrieved product to construct a distribution of the cost of concept. This paper illustrates the proposed approach using printers as an example.