Application of Heuristics Algorithms on Product Development

Abstract

A relevant approach to increase success on products or services is based on customer oriented product design. In this case, the product will support expected requirements while meeting specific characteristic of attributes of particular type of products. Developing new products is an essential ability to compete in markets where important factors appear like globalization, customer demand and quality of products. Due that multi-criteria decision aids approaches are becoming relevant for the product design, thereby preference aggregation and disaggregation approaches complement existing methods in this area, since customer preferences need to be regarded and aggregated to customer preferences models concerning the target market. Besides that, customer needs to express their preference in an easy-to-answer format, taking into consideration they will not be surveyed again. This chapter is focused on describing a heuristic algorithm for product development, particularity focused on a case study of Agrifood products. The heuristic models customer preferences through the disaggregation of global preferences on corn toast products. The use of heuristics for disaggregating and modelling customer preferences has important implications for marketing managers concerning the development of new products, regarding they can be developed from consumer preferences expressed on attributes on known products.