Prioritizing Customers' Requirements for Concurrent Design

Abstract

To realize concurrent design, it is very important to prioritize customers' requirements since they are quickly diversifying to a broad extent. Otherwise, engineers will find it very difficult ot set definite goals for their products and will not be able to cooperate effectively toward product development. In this study, the AHP (analytical hierachical process) technique is introduced to prioritize customers' requirements. A prototype was developed in Smalltalk-80, utilizing its object-oriented programming environment, and the effectiveness of the approach is demonstrated with simple illustrative examples of the selection of joining method. © 1994, The Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers. All rights reserved.