Development and evaluation of a method to estimate the probabilities of occurrence of environment- and system scenarios based on the valuation of trends and a Cross-Impact-Analysis

Abstract

Studies show, that decisions made in the early phase of product development have a significant impact on the quality, cost, development time and success of the product on the market [10] [15]. Activities of foresight are suited to support product developers in their daily activities of product development. The basis for this is the model of PGE – Product Generation Engineering [2]. Product development processes described by the model of PGE always rely on a reference system and distinguish between adoption variation, shape variation and principle variation. The use of foresight in a systematic approach translates the findings of the derived future scenarios into short-term, medium-term and long-term recommendations for action [13]. This approach supports product developers to generate knowledge about future developments as well as to minimize risks by identifying innovation potential. Until now, the recommendations for action are mainly descriptive without any use of probabilities of occurrence of future events. An estimation of these probabilities of occurrence of scenarios could generate further knowledge about the future development and therefore assist product developers in decisions during the early stage of the product development process more effectively. In order to develop a suited method or adapt an existing method, in this paper a literature research is done in order to examine what methods exist so far to assess the probability of occurrence of future events and scenarios. Based on the results a new method is designed to assess probabilities of occurrence of scenarios. The method is validated through a survey. In a last section the contribution to the early stage of product development will be clarified.