English

Abstract

Design concept evaluation plays a critical role in the early phases of product development as it has a significant impact on the downstream development processes, as well as on the success of the product developed. In this work, a novel three-stage methodology has been developed. The preliminary stage screens all the criteria from different viewpoints using House of Quality (HoQ). The second stage uses a FuzzyAnalytical 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 finalizing their choice. A case example from industry is presented to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed methodology. The prospective benefit of this new method is that it can help designers to reduce the risk of late design changes or corrections. The result of the example shows that the HoQ, Fuzzy-AHP and Rough-Grey Analysis approach provided a novel alternative to existing methods of performing design concept evaluation. The proposed framework has successfully helped the designers to reduce the product development time.