A FRAMEWORK OF SET-BASED CONCEPT SELECTION FOR RISK CONTROL OF PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT

Abstract

Product development (PD) projects are generally very risky because there are tremendous uncertain factors to handle. On the other hand, point-based product concept selection is always taken as the mainstream in PD practice to reduce resources consumption or expected lead time, which will inevitably introduce extra uncertainty into the PD process. This paper proposes a new framework of set-based concept selection in PD to improve the probability of project success. It suggests enhancing the decision robustness of product concept selection by allowing parallel evolvement of multiple alternatives, and the size of alternatives group will be re-determined at the next stage by assessing the overall quality of acquired product information at the current stage. The proposed method could provide PD team or manufacturers an optimal solution by balancing resources consumption and robustness of PD project success.