Using AHP and TOPSIS approaches in customer-driven product design process

Abstract

Customer-driven product design process is critically an important part of concurrent engineering (CE). Many new principles and approaches, such as quality function deployment (QFD) and axiomatic design, have been introduced to help designers identify the relationship between customer requirements and design characteristics. However, identification of customer requirements and evaluation of design alternatives are still heavily reliant on designer's experience and knowledge. This will affect the efficiency and effectiveness of the customer-driven design process and even make the development of design automation become more difficult. This paper presents a framework that integrates the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) and the technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) to assist designers in identifying customer requirements and design characteristics, and help achieve an effective evaluation of the final design solution. The proposed approach starts with applying the AHP method to evaluate the relative overall importance of customer requirements and design characteristics. The TOPSIS method is then used to perform competitive benchmarking. Finally, a search strategy is employed to set target values for design characteristics of the recommended design alternative. The performance of the proposed approach is illustrated and validated using a personal digital assistant (PDA) design example. The results show that the proposed approach is capable of helping designers to systematically consider relevant design information and effectively determine the key design objectives and optimal conceptual alternatives.