Robust Concept Set Selection for Risk Control in Product Development Project

Abstract

New product development (NPD) project is with high uncertainty and known as a high failure rate in terms of technical performance or market performance. Concept selection serves as one of the crucial decisions in a NPD project, since the chosen sole concept at the early stage as in regular practice functions as cost driver as well as profitability driver. With the argument that the concept set selection, rather than a single concept selection, should be made for reasonable risk aversion, this paper, based on the previous research of the authors, proposes a detailed modeling effort to enable a robust set-based concept development. Utility theory integrated with uncertain technical levels of product attributes is introduced to express the selection decision risks, and information quality model is set up to connect the quality information with NPD budget. An illustrative case scenario of UCAV demonstrates the applicability of the proposed robust concept set selection framework for NPD risk control.