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Evaluation and decision of products conceptual design schemes based on customer requirements

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Abstract

Within the competitive market environment, understanding customer requirements is crucial for all corporations to obtain market share and survive competition. Only the products exactly meeting customer requirements can win in the market place. Therefore, customer requirements play a very important role in the evaluation and decision process of conceptual design schemes of products. In this paper, an evaluation and decision method based on customer requirements is presented. It utilizes the importance of customer requirements, the satisfaction degree of each evaluation metric to the specification, and an evaluation metric which models customer requirements to evaluate the satisfaction degree of each design scheme to specific customer requirements via the proposed BP neural networks. In the evaluation and decision process, fuzzy sets are used to describe the importance of customer requirements, the relationship between customer requirements and evaluation metrics, the satisfaction degree of each scheme to customer requirements, and the crisp set is used to describe the satisfaction degree of each metric to specifications. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated by an example of front suspension fork design of mountain bikes.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Mechatronics Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, Sichuan, 611731, China

    Hong-Zhong Huang, Yanfeng Li, Yu Liu & Zhonglai Wang

  2. China Science Patent Trademark Agents Ltd., Beijing, 100083, China

    Wenhai Liu

Authors
  1. Hong-Zhong Huang
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  2. Yanfeng Li
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  3. Wenhai Liu
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  4. Yu Liu
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  5. Zhonglai Wang
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Correspondence to Hong-Zhong Huang.

Additional information

This paper was recommended for publication in revised form by Editor Maenghyo Cho

Hong-Zhong Huang is a professor and the Dean of the School of Mechanical, Electronic, and Industrial Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China. He has held visiting appointments at several universities in the USA, Canada, and Asia. He received a Ph.D degree in Reliability Engineering from Shanghai Jiaotong University, China and has published 150 journal papers and 5 books in fields of reliability engineering, optimization design, fuzzy sets theory, and product development. He is a Fellow of ISEAM (International Society of Engineering Asset Management), and a member of ESRA (European Safety and Reliability Association) Technical Committee on System Reliability, a Regional Editor of International Journal of Reliability and Applications, an Editorial Board Member of International Journal of Reliability, Quality and Safety Engineering, International Journal of Quality, Statistics, and Reliability, International Journal of Reliability and Quality Performance, International Journal of Performability Engineering, Advances in Fuzzy Sets and Systems, and The Open Mechanical Engineering Journal. He received the William A. J. Golomski Award from the Institute of Industrial Engineers in 2006, and the Best Paper Award of the 8th International Conference on Frontiers of Design and Manufacturing in 2008. His current research interests include system reliability analysis, warranty, maintenance planning and optimization, computational intelligence in product design.

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Huang, HZ., Li, Y., Liu, W. et al. Evaluation and decision of products conceptual design schemes based on customer requirements. J Mech Sci Technol 25, 2413–2425 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12206-011-0525-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12206-011-0525-6

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