PRODUCT CONFIGURATION DESIGN VIA GROUP DECISION MAKING AND COMBINATORIAL OPTIMIZATION

Due to the importance of quality, different human aspects are used to meet the customer expectations. In this respect, the article deals with group decision making for evaluation and selection of compatible modules for product design configuration to comply with customer expectations. The proposed approach relies on estimations from group of decision makers regarding the given evaluation criteria. A new utility function is formulated to aggregate the estimations of individual decision-makers, weights for relative importance between evaluation criteria, and weights on decision makers in forming the final group decision. This utility function is used as objective function in formulated optimization model with binary decision variables. The described approach is applied in a medium-sized enterprise to propose a new product platform configuration for personal computers. It is shown that usage of different weights for decision maker leads to various modules combinations for the designed product. The applicability of group decision making in modular design is proved by obtained different configurations as a result of using of different weights for the group experts.