Value Engineering-Oriented Approach to Evaluating Conceptual Design Schemes of Sugarcane Harvester

Abstract

In order to improve agricultural machinery product value in conceptual design scheme evaluation, a novel approach was put forward to evaluate conceptual design schemes in the view of value engineering. Realization of the method was divided into cost estimation and function evaluation. In cost estimation, weighted mahalanobis distance between historical data and estimating product schemes were calculated to express their similarity, their cost attributes were described by different membership functions, exponential smoothing method was selected to get estimation solution; in function evaluation, evaluation assignment was chosen to determine function coefficients of different schemes, by using improved AHP to modify judgment matrix. An example of sugarcane harvester is given to illustrate the validity and feasibility of proposed method.