A Hierarchical Group Decision-Making Approach for New Product Selection in a Fuzzy Environment

Selecting the most appropriate new product(s) is regarded as a critical decision impacting the economic success of manufacturing companies. In the new product development process, there are different evaluation attributes typically considered by a group of experts, which often can be structured in a multiple level hierarchy. The purpose of this paper is to provide a new hybrid hierarchical multiple attribute group decision-making approach for evaluating and selecting new product ideas in a fuzzy environment. A hierarchical weighting method is first applied to assess the attributes’ weights by using pair-wise comparisons. This method reduces the number of required pair-wise comparisons effectively. Then, to rank the new product ideas, a fuzzy extension of the classical compromise solution method, namely, VIKOR, is proposed. This method is based upon a simple parameterized distance metric along with a new fuzzy group aggregation approach in order to calculate the ranking index of each alternative by using the triangular fuzzy numbers. Furthermore, a case study in a home appliance manufacturer is provided to illustrate the proposed hybrid approach and demonstrate its applicability. Finally, concluding remarks and future research directions are reported.