Parametric estimation and constraint programming-based planning and simulation of production cost of a new product

Abstract

Currently-used decision support solutions allow decision makers to estimate the cost of developing a new product, its production, and promotion, and compare the estimated cost to the target cost. However, these solutions are inadequate for supporting simulations of identifying conditions, by which the specific cost is reached. The proposed approach provides a framework for searching for possible variants towards reaching the target production cost. This paper is concerned with a prototyping problem of product development described in terms of a constraint satisfaction problem. The proposed method uses parametric estimation to identify relationships between variables, and constraint programming to search for project completion variants within the company's resources and project requirements. The results of an experiment indicate that constraint programming provides effective search strategies for finding admissible solutions. Consequently, the proposed approach allows decision makers to obtain alternative scenarios within the limits imposed by the production process. In this, it outperforms current methods dedicated to the support of evaluating the total cost of a new product. The declarative approach presented in this paper is used to model the production cost; however, it can be effortlessly extended to other aspects of product development (e.g., product reliability).