An Economic Evaluation Model for Product Design Decisions under Concurrent Engineering

ABSTRACT Since a major component of a product cost is highly affected by a design decision made at an early stage of a product life cycle, the optimal design decision is critical in competitive manufacturing environments. For such optimal design decision making, the philosophy of concurrent engineering has become popular. In this paper, we propose an integrated decision model in which decisions on product and process design are simultaneously performed through economic evaluation at each stage of decision making. We introduce a dynamic programming method to determine the optimal design decision which minimizes the product cost under the strategic constraints given. We then apply the proposed decision model together with the solution procedure to a printed circuit board (PCB) designing and manufacturing company to demonstrate the effectiveness of a concurrent design of product and process.