A paradigm for customer-driven product design approach using extended axiomatic design

In the present times, due to increase in customer demands, products complexity is on the rise. This calls for the designers to strike a balance between a wide range of design alternatives and a large set of conflicting criteria. Hence, to take a sound decision by identifying a viable combination of customer requirements and satisfy the conflicting requirements is a difficult task for both the designer and the manufacturer. This work extends the axiomatic design theory to align the customer requirements (CRs) and design parameters (DPs) and generates multiple possible design alternatives based on the weightages of analytic hierarchy process (AHP). Such design alternatives are evaluated on the basis of their overall performance in line with the expected customer attributes, and the best design is identified by integrating the technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution, a ranking multi-criteria decision-making method, with AHP. This work unfolds a support tool for decision makers to accurately and effectively select CRs by a useful aggregation of function requirements and DPs. An industrial example is produced to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed method. This intelligent decision-making method is useful from the customers as well as the manufacturers’ perspective.