A new integrated decision-making approach for design alternative selection for supporting complex product development

Design alternative selection is regarded as a crucial activity in complex product development. The traditional decision-making methods barely consider the design alternative evaluation of complex products or integrate the voices of customers into the decision process systematically. The aim of this paper is to improve the effectiveness of decision making about multiple design alternatives in complex product development under uncertainty. Based on the integration of quality function deployment and group decision making, a new decision-making approach is proposed for assisting product designers in selecting the design alternatives of complex products. Meanwhile, fuzzy set theory is incorporated in order to capture the vagueness and uncertainty that exists in the decision process. In this study, a complex product is divided into multi-parts to form a hierarchical structure. Fuzzy quality function deployment is used for translating customer requirements into the priorities of these parts. Furthermore, a fuzzy multi-criteria group decision-making method is employed for evaluating the performance of part alternatives. All design alternatives are ranked and then selected according to the multiplied evaluation scores of parts with their weights. This proposed approach is applied in a real-world example of a horizontal directional drilling machine. In addition, how the importance weights of customer requirements and evaluation criteria change are analysed under various risk environments.