Pugh matrix and aggregated by extent analysis using trapezoidal fuzzy number for assessing conceptual designs

Abstract

Deciding conceptual stage of engineering design to identify an optimal design concept from a set of alternatives is a task of great interest for manufacturers because it has an impact on profitability of the manufacturing firms in terms of extending product demand life cycle and gaining more market share. To achieve this task, design concepts encompassing all required attributes are developed and the decision is made on the optimal design concept. This article proposes the modeling of decision making in the conceptual design stage of a product as a multicriteria decision making analysis. The proposition is based on the fact that the design concepts can be decided based on considering the available design features and various sub-features under each design feature. Pairwise comparison matrix of fuzzy analytic hierarchy process is applied to determine the weights for all design features and their sub-features depending on the importance to the design features to the optimal design and contributions of the sub-features to the performance of the main design features. Fuzzified Pugh matrices are developed for assessing the availability of the sub-features in the design concept. The cumulative from the Pugh matrices produced a pairwise comparison matrix for the design features from which the design concepts are ranked using a minimum degree of possibility. The result obtained show that the decision process did not arbitrarily apportion weights to the design concepts because of the moderate differences in the final weights.