PRODUCT DESIGN BASED ON CONCURRENT PROCESSING OF DESIGN AND MANUFACTURING INFORMATION BY UTILITY ANALYSIS

A methodology for concurrent decision making of factors concerning pro duct designs and product manufacturing is proposed for obtaining bette r product designs from a wider global viewpoint of the product perform ance and the product manufacturing cost according to the concept of co ncurrent engineering. In this method, first. a function expressing the satisfactory level of the manufacturing division and a function expre ssing the satisfactory level of the design division are formulated for the product design being regarded. Then. an integrated higher ranking decision-making utility function is formulated using these two satisf actory level functions by the utility analysis. Next. Pareto optimum s olution sets of the two multiobjective optimization problems of maximi zation of the product performance and minimization of the product manu facturing cost are obtained for alternative product designs. Finally, on the Pareto optimum solution curves. the values of the integrated sa tisfactory levels are obtained and the most preferable design solution is selected. An applied example of this concurrent design procedure i s given to demonstrate its effectiveness in comparison to a convention al design procedure.