A quality–time–cost‐oriented strategy for product conceptualization

In general, product development companies aim to deliver products of optimal quality while incurring minimal cost in the shortest time possible. In this work, a quality–time–cost‐oriented strategy (QTCOS) is proposed to facilitate product concept generation and selection. Firstly, general sorting is employed to elicit an initial product platform. The platform, constructed with a design space framework (DSF), serves as a base for generating a preliminary range of design options. Using the repertory grids elicitation method, designers contribute importance ratings with respect to a set of time and cost criteria for the range of design options. To account for trade‐offs between cost and time related concerns, these ratings are employed to reduce the number of the derived design options, and thereby used as input features to a restricted coulomb energy (RCE) neural network. The RCE network function is applied to classify the set of design options into different patterns, i.e. cost–time‐pairs. The classification results can subsequently serve as bases for the selection of preferred design options. A case study on wood golf club design is conducted to illustrate the proposed QTCOS.