Product obsolescence assessment based on the hybrid uncertain Information Axiom

Abstract

More and more customers place emphasis on the product obsolescence instead of the product quality, which is driven by changing customer requirements, developing technology and evolving market environments. The product redesign is the prior design strategy to respond to the factors that cause product obsolescence. In this study, the necessary assessment of a product redesign is modelled as the product obsolescence assessment problem based on the Information Axiom. First, the customer-expected functional requirement (FR) and the existing FR of a product are characterised as the design range and the system range, respectively. The information content, which is defined to assess the degree of product obsolescence, is then calculated. In the process of calculating information content, the integral characterised by fuzzy bounds is a challenging problem. To solve this issue, this study proposes a defuzzification method to convert fuzzy bounds into crisp numbers. Finally, the assessment of product obsolescence for a crawler crane is performed as an example to elaborate on the effectiveness of the developed approach.