Abstract—Selecting a design at the conceptual design stage in product development can be complex and frustrating due to imprecise and uncertain product requirements. For many companies, the conceptual design stage is crucial to their product’s success. For example, making a bad decision can lead to costs associated with product recall, redesign, and remanufacture. These unexpected expenses not only could result in profit loss but also jeopardize a successful commercialization of the product. Therefore, the level of success of a product is significantly dependent on the early stage of product development. Managers need robust decision-making tools for valuing potential new product investments in order to justify their development strategy and to allow them to screen out new designs that stand little chance of success at an early stage. However, limitations, such as uncertainty and inability to provide the information on the compatibility between design concepts, remain as challenges for the concept selection method. Therefore, this study proposes a structured conceptual design selection model based on fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) and fuzzy conflict resolution to express the comparative judgments of decision-makers. Also, we perform a comparative analysis between AHP and FAHP results by applying our model to hospital bed designs. This study proves that although both methods are good, FAHP is more robust because of eliminating inconsistencies resulted from personal feelings or judgments.
Index Terms—Conceptual design stage, AHP, Fuzzy AHP, ergonomic design, design for reliability, conflict resolution.
A. Sarfaraz is with the Department of Manufacturing System Engineering and Management, California State University-Northridge, USA (e-mail: sarfaraz@csun.edu).
K. Jenab is Education Chair at Society of Reliability Engineering-Ottawa, Canada (e-mail: jenab@ieee.org).
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Cite: A. Sarfaraz and K. Jenab, "A Fuzzy Conceptual Design Selection Model Considering Conflict Resolution,"
International Journal of Engineering and Technology vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 38-45, 2012.
