Application of Rough Set Theory in Product Design

In today's design industry, designers are facing more pressure from a bigger market and stronger competition. To serve the demanding consumers better, designer can no longer finish the whole design process with their experience alone. Scientific methods are required to help the designers find out the essential factors of product design and the information feedback from the consumers. There are only few enterprises today applying rough set theory to the product design. This method can find the hidden connection between different data, which can help the designers improve the efficiency of design work and reduce the risks involved. We chose 33 middle and small sized cars entering the China's car market in the passing year and did some research on the cars' front face. All are concluded into 13 main factors, a total of 57 categories. After some preliminary analysis, we put the result into the specific program designed to execute rough set analysis to have some deeper research. This whole process helped us find the most suitable combination out of more than 100,000,000 possibilities. Through the case we can see that the rough set theory can save a lot of time and strength for design and allow them to carry out creative product design in a more proper way, which would finally lead to commercial interests as the product perfectly meet the market's needs.