Computational Intelligence for Estimating Cost of New Product Development

Abstract

This paper is concerned with estimating cost of various new product development phases with the use of computational intelligence techniques such as neural networks and fuzzy neural system. Companies tend to develop many new products simultaneously and a limited project budget imposes the selection of the most promising new product development projects. The evaluation of new product projects requires cost estimation. The model of cost estimation contains product design, prototype manufacturing and testing, and it is specified in terms of a constraint satisfaction problem. The illustrative example presents comparative analysis of estimating product development cost using computational intelligence techniques and multiple regression model.