J Intell Manuf (2012) 23:14331443
DOI 10.1007/s10845-010-0473-5
An optimum design selection approach for product
customization development
Chen Liu Alejandro Ramirez-Serrano Guofu Yin
Received: 25 March 2009 / Accepted: 18 October 2010 / Published online: 6 November 2010
Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010
Abstract Consumer preferences and information on
product choice behavior can be of significant value in the
development processes of innovative products. In this paper,
product customization evaluation and selection model is
introduced to support imprecision inherent of qualitative
inputs from customers and designers in the decision mak-
ing process. Focusing on customer utility generation, an
optimum design selection approach based on fuzzy set deci-
sion-making is proposed, where design attributes priority is
identified from customer preferences using an analytical hier-
archy process. A multi-attribute analysis diagram is devel-
oped to visualize the preference of each attribute from the
experts group decision. Conjoint analysis is used in the prod-
uct customization to focus on customer utility generation in
terms of multiple criteria. The use of the decision-making
method is illustrated with a case example that highlights the
utility of the proposed method.
Keywords Product customization selection Fuzzy sets
Conjoint analysis Analytical hierarchy process
C. Liu
China Institute of Atomic Energy,
Beijing, Peoples Republic of China
e-mail: liuchenyy@gmail.com
C. Liu A. Ramirez-Serrano
Department of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering,
University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, Canada
A. Ramirez-Serrano
e-mail: aramirez@ucalgary.ca
G. Yin (B)
School of Manufacturing Science and Engineering,
Sichuan University, Chengdu, China
e-mail: yingf.jim@gmail.com
Introduction
To attain competitive advantage for the product organiza-
tion, product design confronts unprecedented pressure for
satisfying different market demands from todays global and
competitive business environment. The design decision pro-
cedure of selecting an appropriate design result for a given
product is perhaps the most critical stage in the product design
when further product development is required.
Product design selection is influenced by many factors
such as market demand based on customers preference, and
designers knowledge and experience in handling design and
market issues (Besharati et al. 2006). Generally, custom-
ers preference reflects the demand of market side, while
designers technical consideration is obviously critical in pre-
dicting product performance with respect to its attributes.
In fact, there are numerous difficulties associated with the
product evaluation and selection process which lie in the
complexity of solving design problems, adopting decision
criteria, and assessing product performance (Jiao and Tseng
1998; Zha et al. 2005), etc, about which customers may not
know or consider less at the point of purchase (Besharati et al.
2006), since consumers are mainly aware of their own needs
without thinking about technical attributes that can be easily
used for evaluating design alternatives. Therefore, design-
ers will inevitably confront the problem of comprehensively
regarding the customers preference and their own technical
consideration in product design.
There are a number of solutions reported in the literature
that have been commonly used for product design selection
and evaluation, such as Multi-Attribute Utility (MAU) the-
ory (Farquhar et al. 1977). MAU theory is a structured meth-
odology designed in handling the tradeoffs among multiple
objectives. It is applied to model a decision makers prefer-
ences based on utility functions developed on a set of multiple
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attributes. Such utility functions are used to quantify the
desirability of certain alternatives in the areas of engineering
and marketing for decision making. Besharati et al. (2006)
proposed a generalized modeling approach for supporting the
selection in product design, where MAU approach is applied
to capture the designers considerations.
In order to regard customer preferences in the multi-
attribute design evaluation process, some existed evaluation
procedures take into account the relative importance of (or
weighting factor for) each criterion being considered (Jiao
and Tseng 1998). Further, the Analytical Hierarchy Process
(AHP) (Saaty 1980) has been proven to be a more rigorous
procedure for determining customer preferences because it is
relatively easy to use and can effectively handle both qualita-
tive and quantitative data. This data is compared in a pairwise
fashion with respect to the relative importance of (or prefer-
ence for) each criterion between hierarchical decision levels
(Chiang et al. 2008; Kwong and Bai 2002). We note that Ayag
(2005) also proposed to use the AHP technique to evaluate
conceptual design alternatives in new product development.
Conjoint analysis (Green and Srinivasan 1978) is another
approach of solving the multi-attribute decision problems
where the focus is preference elicitation at the individual
customer level (Besharati et al. 2006). In addition, in order
to overcome preference aggregation problems and account
for choice uncertainty, the conjoint model can be based on
a discrete choice model that utilizes an individuals selec-
tion behavior (Louviere et al. 2000). Chen et al. (2005) pro-
posed a product definition and customization system using
an integrated methodology of conjoint analysis and Kohonen
association techniques.
Although there are numerous models that have been used,
the deterministic models (such as the first choice model based
on the customers utilities) have been applied in practice to
select the product with the highest customer utility. However,
such techniques cannot deal with intangible criteria, since the
utility analysis approach requires the expected performance
with respect to each criterion to be represented in a quantita-
tive form, for this reason it is difficult to quantify intangible
criteria such as some of the qualitative design criteria in early
design stages (Thurston and Crawford 1994).
Indeed, to search for the optimal design alternatives with
the development of trade-off techniques for making deci-
sions, effective product evaluation has to consider both tan-
gible (e.g., physical dimensions and production cost) and
intangible (e.g., reliability and compatibility) criteria, along
with quantitative and qualitative performance measures.
From a practical viewpoint, consumers preference reflects
the psychological requirements which are conceptually
vague with uncertainty and frequently presented in linguis-
tic forms (Tsai and Hsiao 2004). Fuzzy analysis, based on
fuzzy set theory, excels in capturing semantic uncertainty
with linguistic terms. It is capable of dealing with qualitative
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J Intell Manuf (2012) 23:14331443
or imprecise inputs from customers and designers. Numer-
ous publications and research works indicate that fuzzy set
analysis is a useful tool in decision-making problems with
multiple goals or criteria (Shao et al. 2006; Zha et al. 2005).
Moreover, fuzzy set analysis is appropriate in making the
best selection among several alternatives under defined cri-
teria which are represented in fuzzy terms.
In this paper, we develop an approach to comprise the cus-
tomers preferences and designers technical considerations
in the process of selection and evaluation of product design,
and thus can help consumers select the right product to meet
their needs. For this aim, a product evaluation and selection
model is defined to formulate the technical criteria and con-
sider customers requirements. Then, a multi-attribute anal-
ysis diagram is proposed to visualize the preference of each
attribute from experts viewpoints. Finally, a case study on
mobile robot selection and evaluation is exemplified to vali-
date the modeling approach and the decision-making method.
Technically, we use fuzzy set technique to analyze the uncer-
tainties of customers and designers, and fuzzy analysis tech-
nique to investigate customers responses to design options,
the proposed approach thus can make product design more
effective and accurate, and could be adapted to different qual-
itative design and customers criteria.
We mention that the method of making design decisions
on the basis of customers requirements is an extension of
the previous work (Liu et al. 2009), where the goal was to
provide an effective strategy for associating customer infor-
mation with a given product concept.
This paper is organized as follows. In Sect. Fuzzy deci-
sion-making method, a description of the fuzzy decision-
making method is introduced. Section An optimum selection
approach for product customization development describes
an optimum selection approach for product customization
development based on the fuzzy decision-making method.
Section A case study exemplifies an the proposed approach.
Finally, the concluding remarks of the paper are provided in
Sect. Conclusions.
Fuzzy decision-making method
A good design decision-making model must be able to
accommodate vagueness because fuzziness is a common
characteristic encountered in any design decision making
problems. Under these conditions, the transformation of
qualitative preferences to precise numerical values is usually
inappropriate, and decision-makers often therefore provide
uncertain estimates rather than precise answers.
Representation of triangular fuzzy numbers
A fuzzy set is defined as a pair (A, A ), where A R is a
subset of real number set, and A : A [0, 1] is called
J Intell Manuf (2012) 23:14331443
Fig. 1 Membership function of a triangular fuzzy number
the member function on A. A fuzzy number is a convex,
normalized fuzzy set whose membership function is at
least segmentally continuous and has the functional value
A (x) = 1 at precisely one element. A triangular fuzzy num-
ber, denoted by p = ( p 1 , p 2 , p 3 ), is a special case of fuzzy
number, where p 1 , p 2 and p 3 R satisfy: p 1 p 2 p 3 ,
and p ( p 1 ) = p ( p 3 ) = 0, p ( p 2 ) = 1. Figure 1 shows
the graph of function p . For simplicity, we will sometimes
call the increasing boundary of the shape left-edge, while the
decreasing boundary right-edge of p. See Zadeh (1965) for
details.
Triangular fuzzy numbers have a number of advantages
such as simple representation, speedy calculation and suffi-
cient precision that are relatively more effective than other
methods to represent customers expectations and experts
satisfactions (Xu et al. 2007). There are many applications
that use triangular fuzzy numbers in engineering design.
Bykzkan et al. (2007) proposed a fuzzy group deci-
sion making approach to fuse multiple preference styles to
respond to customer needs with a set of triangular fuzzy num-
bers in the product development. Vanegas and Labib (2005)
presented a number of fuzzy set approaches for design eval-
uation where weights of criteria and performance levels are
captured by triangular fuzzy numbers.
Moreover, the fuzzy approach for ranking a set of alterna-
tives against a set of criteria is also needed to cope with uncer-
tain and incomplete information. In what follows, a fuzzy
ranking approach is described based on fuzzy set theory.
Ranking fuzzy numbers
In practice, ranking fuzzy numbers is a very important deci-
sion making procedure. For example, the design concept of
optimum or best choice to come true are completely based on
ranking or comparison. As in Chen (1985), we will employ
the concept of maximizing set and minimizing set to decide
the order of the fuzzy numbers.
Assume there are n N triangular fuzzy numbers,
denoted by ( pi1 , pi2 , pi3 ) for i {1, . . . , n} respectively, and
1435
Fig. 2 Maximizing/minimizing triangular fuzzy numbers
f i be the corresponding membership function. Let xmin =
mini { pi1 } and xmax = maxi { pi3 }. Define the maximizing/min-
imizing triangular fuzzy numbers as M = (xmin , xmax , xmax )
and G = (xmin , xmin , xmax ), with their membership func-
tions as f M and f G respectively. Figure 2 gives an example
for n = 2. By the property of triangular fuzzy numbers, f G
and f M in a given design problem will inevitably intersect
the boundaries of the n membership functions f i . Let U M (i)
be the cross point of left-edge of f M and the right-edge of
f i , UG (i) be the cross point of right-edge of f G and the left-
edge of f i . Formally, they are defined as
U M (i) = sup ( f M (x) f i (x)), (1)
x
UG (i) = sup ( f G (x) f i (x)), (2)
x
where the notion means the intersection operation of
fuzzy numbers, and sup means the supremum function.
The total utility value of each fuzzy number is then defined
by
U M (i) + 1 UG (i)
UT (i) = . (3)
2
By calculating the total utility value of each fuzzy number,
the fuzzy numbers can be ranked in consequence.
An optimum selection approach for product
customization development
In this paper, an optimum design selection approach for
product customization development based on fuzzy set deci-
sion-making is proposed. The approach is used to identify the
optimal product design from a set of product design alterna-
tives. The details of the approach are presented in this section.
Identification of design attributes priority
The attributes priority is identified by an Analytical Hierar-
chy Process (AHP) from customer preference. The linguistic
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variables on customer expectation preferences are considered Fuzzy evaluation of relative importance of individual
as the input for the product customization selection. Here, the customer expectation
customer expectation preferences are modeled with linguis-
tic sets. Fuzzy evaluation of customers expectations is analyzed by
their relative importance in a pairwise comparison way. Let
pql = ( pql 1 , p 2 , p 3 ) denote the measure value of expec-
ql ql
tation of the qth customer for the lth need, where q
Customer expectations modeling
{1, . . . , s}, l {1, . . . , k}, and s, k denote the number of
customers and their needs respectively.
The preference reflection of customers is frequently pre-
To obtain pairwise comparison ratios of the fuzzy num-
sented in linguistic forms in statements such as the cost 2 of fuzzy number p is taken to
bers, the peak value pql ql
should be low, the quality of the product should be good,
represent the importance intensity for the lth need. The rel-
etc. Customer expectations are captured difficultly by means
ative importance alv is considered as the important ratio of
of a definite structure. Fuzzy set theory is a rational approach
the lth need compared with the vth need. Formally, alv = 1
that uses linguistic characterizations toward decision-mak-
for the case of l = v; for other cases it is defined as
ing by taking into account human subjective judgments. The
linguistic variables are used to allow precise modeling of alv = pql
2
pqv
2
. (4)
imprecise statements such as very important or less satis-
2 p 2 , and
if pql
faction to linguistically evaluate the importance of the cus- qv
tomer needs. In the proposed approach any number of fuzzy
alv = 1/avl = 1/( pqv
2
pql
2
) (5)
sets can be used to model the customers expectation prefer-
ences. The number of fuzzy sets will depend on the problem otherwise, where l, v {1, . . . , k} and q {1, . . . , s}.
at hand. For example, in order to explain the level of expec- Thus, the relative importance of individual customer
tation of customer needs easily, six linguistic sets have been expectation is obtained.
developed: (1) Very Low, (2) Low, (3) Medium Low, (4)
Medium High, (5) High, (6) Very High. Moveover, these lin- Ranking the importance of customer needs
guistic sets can be quantified with corresponding triangular
fuzzy numbers as shown in Table 1, Fig. 3. To obtain the importance of all customer needs, the pairwise
comparison method, developed by Saaty (1980), is utilized
for ranking customer needs by their importance. A k k
matrix A is obtained from the pairwise comparison with rel-
Table 1 Linguistic variables for the importance and the ratings
ative importance of fuzzy customer expectations. The matrix
Linguistic variables Triangular A satisfies
fuzzy
numbers a11 a12 . . . a1k w1 w1
a21 a22 . . . a2k w2 w2

Very Low (VL) (0,0,1) .. .. .. .. .. = k .. (6)
Low (L) (0,1,3) . . . . . .
Medium Low (ML) (1,3,5) ak1 ak2 . . . akk wk wk
Medium High (MH) (3,5,7) We note that the values in the upper triangle of the matrix
High (H) (5,7,8) are the reciprocal values of the elements in the lower triangle
Very High (VH) (7,8,8) of this matrix, so only k(k1)
2 comparisons are needed for
ranking. Equation (6) can be denoted as
AW = kW, (7)
or
(A k I )W = 0, (8)
where I is an k k identity matrix. From this equation, it
is apparent that k is an eigenvalue of A , and W is an corre-
sponding eigenvector for k. Since the judgment matrix A is
created based on the decision makers subjective judgments,
the estimation errors will more or less exist in this pairwise
Fig. 3 Fuzzy membership function for expectation of customer needs comparison matrix. In such a case, the vector W satisfies

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Table 2 Consistency indices for random reciprocal matrices with different orders
Size of matrix 1 2 3 4
RI 0 0 0.58 0.90
AW = max W, (9)
where max is the maximum eigenvalue of A considering
estimation errors, and it has
max k. (10)
Saaty (1980) introduced the consistency index CI to judge
the consistency of the judgments between max and k. CI is
the measure to evaluate the deviation from consistency of the
pairwise ratios and is calculated as
max k
CI = . (11)
k1
When the elements of a comparison matrix are generated
randomly, the CI for such matrix is represented as a random
consistency index RI. The values of RI for different orders
of matrices are summarized in Table 2.
The consistency ratio CR is calculated to monitor the con-
sistency of the comparison matrix as
CR = CI/RI. (12)
If CR 0.1, the level of consistency is acceptable. The
pairwise comparison matrix is considered to be adequately
consistent. If the CR exceeds this, the decision-maker is
advised to check the elements of matrix A to produce a more
consistent matrix.
In the process the importance of customers needs can be
obtained by identifying the maximum eigenvalue max and
the corresponding eigenvector, W = (w1 , w2 , . . . , wk ), of
matrix A.
Identification of the attributes priority from customer
preferences
Since each individual design alternative is described by sev-
eral attributes based on the design specifications, evaluation
of design candidates are easily accomplished based on design
attributes. The design attributes, i.e., technical terms used by
design engineers, are seen as techniques criteria. However,
the designer deals with technical attributes that are not of
any interest to a customer (or are beyond customers knowl-
edge) and customer needs are usually described by qualitative
expressions, evaluation of design candidates in terms of cus-
tomer satisfaction is difficult to be conducted directly. For this
reason, the relationship between customer needs and product
attributes has to be developed when the design candidates are
evaluated based on customer needs. Hence, the development
1437
5 6 7 8 9
1.12 1.24 1.32 1.42 1.45
Fig. 4 The analytic hierarchy process structure for the selection of
product alternatives
of product customization is structured into different hierar-
chical levels to provide representing and quantifying relat-
ing criteria. The overall customer goals are obtained from
multi-level structure for evaluating alternative solutions. The
used analytic hierarchy process structure is shown in Fig. 4
which reveals the relation between various criteria used for
the selection of product customization development. With the
AHP, the objectives, criteria and alternatives are arranged in
a hierarchical structure similar to a family tree (Albayrak and
Erensal 2004).
As shown in Fig. 4, the overall goal is expressed as a root
node. Each criterion is categorized from the goal level. All
attribute nodes, as design subcriterion, are the sub-nodes of
corresponding criterion nodes and are listed in the subcriteri-
on (attribute) level. In this multilevel taxonomy, each node is
stemmed from the high-level design goal, and each criterion
influences on design alternatives in the lowest level of the
hierarchy. In practice, the number and content of nodes may
be changed depending on the different goals that can be set
in the problem.
Customers needs are derived from each node of the cri-
terion level in the hierarchy. To quantify relative priority of
a given set of customers needs, the importance measures of
k customer needs in the criterion level are identified as:

W X Y = w y 1 , w y 1 , . . . , w y 1 , . . . , w y 1 (13)
1 2 l k
The nodes relative meaning and importance are judged
using pairwise compare method in attribute level. WY Z
denotes the priority of attributes in the subcriterion level
is identified from corresponding each criterion from the
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criterion level. Thus, the overall priority of attributes W X Z

is achieved as:

W X Z = W X Y WY Z

= wy1 wy2 , . . . , wy1 wy2 ,
1 Y Z l Y Z

. . . , wy1 wy2 (14)
k Y Z

Accordingly, the consistency of the judgment matrix is

satisfactory when every CR is less than 0.1. It is said that
the judgment matrix is logical. The overall consistency index
CI X Z and random consistency index RI X Z are computed
using the following functions:
Fig. 5 Fuzzy membership function for satisfaction of experts
usually causes imprecise evaluation and serious difficulties
during the decision-making process. For this reason, the cur-

k
rent study proposes to use a group decision that improves the
CI X Z = CIY Z W X Y = CI y 1 w y 1 (15)
l=1
l l original evaluation based on various experts independent
evaluation.

k
RI X Z = RIY Z W X Y = RI y 1 w y 1 (16) Suppose there are Q experts {e1 , e2 , . . . , e Q }. Each expert
l l eq evaluates ri alternatives with respect to design attributes
l=1
CI X Z metrics t j for i {1, . . . , m} and j {1, . . . , n}. Denote by
CR X Z = < 0.1 (17) pqi j = ( pqi
1 , p 2 , p 3 ) the evaluation value of alternative i
RI X Z j qi j qi j
by expert q with respect to criterion j. pi j denotes the overall
Fuzzy evaluation of product alternatives from the experts evaluation for alternative i with criterion j and is calculated
point of view as follows:
 T
pi j = p1i j , p2i j , . . . , pqi j , . . . , p Qi j
In this section, the overall fuzzy measure matrix of design
alternatives with respect to design attributes is achieved from = ( pi1j , pi2j , pi3j ), (18)
satisfaction of different experts. The level of satisfaction of
where
experts with respect to the given attributes of alternatives
are modeled in linguistic sets, and a multi-attribute analy- pi1j = min pqi j,
1
sis diagram is used to visualize the comparison between the q

different alternatives.
Q
pi2j = pqi2
j /q,
Expert satisfactions using linguistic sets q=1

pi3j = max pqi

3
j, (19)
q
The design attributes are technical terms used by design engi-
neers. It is thus necessary to identify the designers prefer- where i {1, . . . , m}, j {1, . . . , n}.
ences from the experts point of view. Due to the lack of suf- The overall measure matrix Pmn is calculated as
ficient information, the design attributes of alternatives are
usually evaluated by the experts in ambiguous terms such as p11 . . . p1 j . . . p1n

Reliability is not good. Thus, the satisfaction of experts Pmn = ... ... ... ... ... , (20)
with respect to design attributes of product in the subcriteri- pm1 . . . pm j . . . pmn
on (attribute) level is described by a measure corresponding
to six linguistic sets, which are used to model this measure: where m denotes the number of design alternatives and n
(1) Very Poor (VP), (2) Poor (P), (3) Medium Poor (MP), (4) denotes the number of design criteria.
Medium Good (MG), (5) Good (G), (6) Very Good (VG), as
shown in Fig. 5. Visual comparison on the alternatives

Fuzzy measure matrix of product alternatives with design
attributes
Generally, different experts have different specific skill or
knowledge about product design. If this is the case, it
Each individual design alternative may contain several attri-
butes of the design specifications. The metrics for this level
of evaluation include not only the product functionality, but
also other criteria including some life-cycle issues, such as
assembability, manufacturability, maintainability, reliability,

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Fig. 6 Multi-attribute analysis diagram
and efficiency. In order to obtain the most desirable alterna-
tive, the comparison between attributes is necessary. From
the experts point of view, the importance of each attribute
must be measured quantitatively. The multi-attribute priority
measurement of design alternatives need to be interpreted to
analyze preference judgments for ranking the relative pref-
erence levels of the alternatives. Therefore, it is necessary to
represent the design alternatives in a visual way. Herein, a
visualization aid is presented to quantify the relative prefer-
ence levels of attributes of design alternatives.
As the illustrative multi-attribute analysis diagram shown
in Fig. 6, each attribute of alternatives indicates the quan-
titative measure of experts satisfaction level. The measure
value is the peak value of the corresponding fuzzy number pi j
which is the satisfaction of experts with respect to alternatives
i. Some attributes of one design alternative under consider-
ation (e.g., y 2j ) have a superior value when compared to others
alternatives, but other attributes of the same alternative are
inferior to others. Therefore, the multiple attributes analysis
diagram attempts to identify strong and weak points of each
attribute of alternatives. The diagram shows a gap between
the alternatives in each attribute, and then along with cus-
tomer preferences provides more information in the whole
decision-making process.
However, since the selection of product customization
has different level of priority to the customer when obtain-
ing the desirable design alternative, the final selection of
the optimum design scheme is obtained through a series
of evaluation, weighting, transformation, and computation
processes. It is apparently that the multi-attribute decision-
making method under customer expectations is essential for
ranking the candidates. With these results, we will intro-
duces the conjoint analysis method in the following to obtain
an optimum selection based on customers and designers
preferences.
1439
Conjoint analysis for customer utility generation in terms of
multiple criteria
The conjoint analysis, proposed by Green and Srinivasan
(1978), is used to evaluate multi-attribute alternatives on
the assumption of individual that customers responses are
approximately intervals in a measurement level. It is an
appropriate method that makes decision for the select of prod-
uct customization.
In this method, conjoint analysis strategy is used to obtain
the best satisfied product from various alternatives with
respect to the customer preferences based on the customers
utility generation. By integrating design attributes priority
from customer preferences and product alternatives from the
experts point of view, a multi-attribute preference ranking
approach for product customization using customers utility
metric is proposed. Herein, a customer utility metric forms
the basis for a decision modeling that supports the selection
in product design. The utility function representing the cus-
tomer preference on design alternatives is defined as
U = Osn Pmn
T
, (21)
where U is the customer utility for design alternatives, Osn
denotes the preference matrix from customer with respect to
the design criteria, and Pmn denotes the measure matrix of
product alternatives from various experts.
This conjoint analysis procedure has to be performed for
the overall design alternatives under consideration, and the
output of the decision-making is the alternative with the high-
est customers utility value that meets both designers prefer-
ences and market demand the best. For instance, the design
alternative ri , which is ranked first as the customer preferred
choice, is related to the maximum utility value Mi as
Mi = max u i j , (22)
1 jm
for i {1, . . . , s}. Therefore, the customer information is
input into conjoint analysis procedure in terms of customer
and designer preferences ratings, which affect the final results
of the design decision-making in terms of the customer
utility.
A case study
A case study is applied to demonstrate the effect of the intro-
duced optimum selection approach for product customization
development. In this example, product design alternatives of
mobile robots with tracked locomotion are analyzed using
the fuzzy decision support method. As a demonstration of
our approach, we only consider three robot design alterna-
tives as shown in Table 3. The proposed approach meets indi-
vidual customer requirements via product customization for
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Table 3 The basic information of three robot alternatives
Alternative Controller Speed Vision
sensor
r1 Manual and 50 km/h Omnidirectional camera
Autonomous control
r2 Manual and 20 km/h Radar
Autonomous control
r3 Manual and 15 km/h Radar and camera
Autonomous control
different customers having different requirements. Specifi-
cally, the identification of the best design candidate is carried
out for different customers in the following three steps.
Step 1: Identifying the attributes priority from different
customer preferences.
The selection of alternatives is a process of integrating dif-
ferent views from the angles of engineering, economy and
environment. For clarity, it is depicted as a hierarchy structure
as shown in Fig. 7. Specifically, engineering performance
explains the meaning of technical parameters from the view
of product engineering, and embodies as the attributes of
kinematic accuracy, motion efficiency, and reliability. Econ-
omy performance involves two attributesproduction cost
and work life. Further, environment performance reflects the
ability of robots adapt for different environment and can be
detailed as three attributes: the structural complexity attri-
bute reflects the state or quality of robot; the noise attribute
denotes the interference level between robots and the sur-
rounding; while environment suitability attribute denotes the
ability that robots adapt to different conditions. Therefore,
the technical criteria for evaluating the robot can be naturally
described as the above eight design attributes as a whole.
Fig. 7 The analytic hierarchy process structure for the selection of
alternatives
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Wireless Rain Hill Price
communication sensor capability ($)
Yes Yes 30 degree 5,200
Optional No 15 degree 3,800
Optional No 18 degree 3,000
Firstly, customers are chosen from different groups to con-
tribute their preferences of design needs. This is a key step
of the product development of robot design. For simplicity,
two extreme types of customers are considered in our case.
In detail, one type of customers expect robots with high per-
formance and suitability and hope the selected robots can be
really used in industrial applications, while another type of
customers show more interesting to the cheap price and ele-
mentary functions of robots as they will be mainly used in
laboratories for teaching and experimental purposes.
Then, customers are asked to select the corresponding
linguistic sets based on personal requirement (See Table 1;
Fig. 3). In our case, the customer C1 expects three perfor-
mance needs, i.e., VH, L and H; while they are ML,
VH and L for customer C2 correspondingly.
The importance of customer expectations is determined
by the pairwise comparison method shown in Table 4 (See
Sect. Fuzzy evaluation of relative importance of individual
customer expectation and Ranking the importance of cus-
tomer needs). Accordingly, the comparison matrixes of layer
Y-Z are shown in Table 5. The pairwise comparison method
can be performed to evaluate attributes priority from differ-
ent customer preferences. The priority of the eight design
attributes can be obtained from the two specific customers
using Eq. (14) as shown in Table 6 (See Sect. 3.1.4).
Step 2: Fuzzy evaluating the product alternatives from the
experts point of view.
In this example, four experts from design, manufacture,
usage and maintenance fields respectively are asked to con-
tribute their satisfaction on each design alternative with
respects to design criteria. These experts pick out suitable lin-
guistic sets according to the method shown in Fig. 5. to eval-
uate each alternative. As a result, Table 7. shows the measure
value of four experts and the overall evaluation result with
respects to design alternative r1 calculated using Eqs. (18)
and (19). Moreover, Table 8. lists the fuzzy measure matrix
of three robot alternatives with different design criteria from
four experts using Eq. (20).
Step 3: Conjointly analyzing customer utility generation
in terms of multiple criteria.
J Intell Manuf (2012) 23:14331443 1441

Table 4 The result of pairwise

Layer W max CI CR
comparison matrix
X1 Y (0.9232, 0.1102, 0.3683) 3.0324 0.0162 0.0279
X2 Y (0.2181, 0.9682, 0.1228) 3.0142 0.0071 0.0122
y11 Z (0.1862, 0.8527, 0.4881) 3.0183 0.0091 0.0158
y21 Z (0.9487, 0.3162) 2.0 0 0
y31 Z (0.1102, 0.3683, 0.9232) 3.0324 0.0162 0.0279

Table 5 Paired comparison results for the Engineering (y11 ), Econ- The alternatives fuzzy evaluation membership functions
omy (y21 ) and Environment (y31 ) in the subcriterion level (Y) are ranked as shown in Figs. 8 and 9 in a descending order of
y11 y12 y22 y32 W y 1 Z U using Eqs. (1), (2) and (3). We note that the product design
1
alternative with the highest customer utility value will be the
y12 1 1/4 3 0.1862 best choice for product customization.
y22 4 1 2 0.8527 A simple analysis of the design evaluation results shows
y32 3 1/2 1 0.4881 the following:

y31 y62 y72 y82 W y 1 Z 1) The customer utility with respect to design alternatives is
3
treated as the customer preference level to those selected
y62 1 1/4 1/7 0.1102 alternatives.
y72 4 1 1/3 0.3683 2) The customer utility matrix is obtained with qualitative
y82 7 3 1 0.9232 inputs from customers and designers. The expectation of
customer needs and satisfaction of experts are modeled
y21 y42 y52 W y 1 Z
2 in the triangular fuzzy numbers.
y42 1 3 0.9487 3) Two customers show different preferences in selecting
y52 1/3 1 0.3162 design alternatives, i.e. customer C1 selects robot alter-
native r1 which has high performance, while customer
C2 prefers robot alternative r3 which satisfies the need
The customer utility matrix for different alternatives is of low price.
obtained from Eq. (21). For two specific customers, Table 9
lists their corresponding customer utility values with respect As demonstrated in the above example, the approach
to each alternative. The results of the fuzzy decision-making guides the designer to determine which of the alternatives
method for each design alternative are used to help the final could possibly satisfy corresponding customers and thus gain
decision making process of the product manager or customer. a higher potential demand for further product development.

Table 6 Attributes priority of two specific customers (Osn )

Customer Design attributes
ranking
t1 (y12 ) t2 (y22 ) t3 (y32 ) t4 (y42 ) t5 (y52 ) t6 (y62 ) t7 (y72 ) t8 (y82 )

C1 0.1719 0.7872 0.4506 0.1045 0.0348 0.0406 0.1356 0.3400

C2 0.0406 0.1860 0.1065 0.9185 0.3061 0.0135 0.0452 0.1134

Table 7 Measurement of four experts and the overall evaluation result with respects to design alternative r1
Design Design attributes

Alternative (r1 ) t1 t2 t3 t4 t5 t6 t7 t8

E1 VG G VG P MG MP VG MG
E2 VG VG G VP MP MG G MP
E3 G G MG MP MG MG VG MG
E4 MG G G P P MP G G
Overall(E) (3,7,8) (5,7.25,8) (3,6.75,8) (0,1.25,5) (0,3.5,7) (1,4,7) (5,7.5,8) (1,5,8)

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1442 J Intell Manuf (2012) 23:14331443

Table 8 Fuzzy measure matrix of product alternatives (Pmn )

Design Design attributes
Alternative t1 t2 t3 t4 t5 t6 t7 t8

r1 (3,7,8) (5,7.25,8) (3,6.75,8) (0,1.25,5) (0,3.5,7) (1,4,7) (5,7.5,8) (1,5,8)

r2 (3,6,8) (3,5.5,8) (1,4.5,8) (1,3.5,7) (1,3.5,7) (1,3.5,7) (1,4,7) (0,3.5,7)
r3 (0,3.5,8) (0,1.75,7) (3,6,8) (5,7.8,8) (5,7.8,8) (1,4.5,7) (0,1.75,5) (0,3,8)

Table 9 Customer utility U

from two customers Customer Design alternatives
r1 r2 r3

C1 (6.8621,12.0619,14.4975) (3.6434,9.7508,15.8661) (2.0889,7.2094,15.2870)

C2 (1.7242,5,5218,10.7633) (2.0696,6.1976,12.4417) (6.4560,11.1318,13.5033)

enables engineers to evaluate design alternatives with related

criteria such as the customers preferences and engineerings
view points.

Acknowledgments The research reported in this paper is supported

by the National Natural Science Foundation of China through Grant
No. 50575153 and Technology Research & Development Foundation
of Sichuan Province of China through Grant No. 2008GZ0063. We
acknowledge the support from the China Scholarship Council.
Fig. 8 Membership function for the utility ranking of customer C1

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