Incorporating probabilistic model of customers' preferences in concurrent engineering

Concurrent engineering has been generally accepted as an important approach to reduce time to market. For years, the focus of concurrency has been design and manufacturing. With customers' inputs becoming more crucial for product development, incorporating customers' preferences into the design process has become significant in the continuing quest for reducing time to market. Because customers' preferences involve intricate interdependency on factors such as product attributes, deterministic methods often fall short of representing and manipulating their probabilistic nature. This paper presents a probabilistic model that could continuously incorporate and adapt customers' preferences into the concurrent engineering methodology.