A data-driven multi-criteria decision-making approach for assessing new product conceptual designs

The surge in competition among companies to acquire a more significant portion of the market as well as respecting customer preferences in high quality and diverse products result in a reduction of product life cycles. Accordingly, companies are under enormous pressure to introduce new high quality and diverse products on time. Assessing new product designs at the primary phases of new product development (NPD) is a necessary and complex activity that can considerably reduce the time and cost of introducing new products to the market. The current methods of evaluating new product conceptual designs, including employing decision-making methods based on subjective opinions of experts, utilizing simulation packages, and following trial-and-error approaches in prototyping, may be inefficient, very time-consuming, and costly. To overcome this issue, this paper develops a quantitative data-driven Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) approach founded on the combination of an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) method and Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS), to assess the new conceptual designs. So that the ANN method is utilized to predict the performance characteristics of new designs based on the related existed data of similar products, and TOPSIS is employed to score and rank different proposed alternatives designs. Finally, a case study of evaluating new product conceptual designs in an automotive research and development company is considered to demonstrate the performance and applicability of the proposed approach.