Assessment of product resilience towards the changing customer requirements

Abstract

Changes of customer requirements (CRs) are inevitable disturbances for products which will lead to product obsolescence or frequent redesign. The property of product defending and recovering from the shock of ever-changing CRs is resilience. It is beneficial for designers to explore and evaluate product resilience towards changing CRs. Fortunately, various resilience assessment methods in engineering realm have offered some significant insights. Motivated by the deficiencies of the existing studies and the advantages of engineering resilience assessment methods, product resilience towards changing CRs is measured. Firstly, joint customer satisfaction is defined by integrating competition analysis and importance analysis. Secondly, the evolution trends of CRs are depicted and captured based on a modified grey model and polynomial fitting, respectively. Then, a three-stage model considering absorption, adaptation, and recovery is established to evaluate product resilience. Lastly, a case study of an electric vehicle is implemented to elucidate the utility and effectiveness of the proposed method.