An Integrated Robust Design and Marketing Approach for Product Design Selection Process

Abstract

We present an integrated engineering design and marketing approach to facilitate the selection of a robust set of product designs to carry forward to the prototype stage. Our approach considers variability (i.e., noise or uncertainty) in both (i) engineering design domain, and (ii) customer preferences in marketing domain, to prune a set of design alternatives to a manageable size. In the design domain, our approach evaluates performance and feasibility robustness of a design alternative when there are variations in uncontrollable parameters. The goal of our approach in the design domain is to obtain a set of design alternatives that shows the best possible performance while maintaining feasibility even if the alternatives are subject to applications and environments that are different from their standard laboratory conditions (i.e., nominal parameter values). In the marketing domain, our approach considers the impact of performance variations in different usage situations and conditions on customer preferences and the uncertainties and sampling errors in estimating customer preferences. In addition, competitive products and their positions are considered in pruning the set of design alternatives. We illustrate our approach in the context of the design of a cordless power tool example, which highlights the advantages of using our approach.