Constraint Programming for New Product Development Project Prototyping

The paper is concerned with using computational intelligence for identifying the relationships between variables and constraint programming for searching variants of completing a new product development project. The relationships are used to the cost estimation of newproduct development (NPD) and to the search for possible variants of reaching the desirable NPD cost. The main contribution of this paper is the use of constraint programming to a project prototyping problem in the context of product development. Moreover, the paper presents a method for estimating the NPD cost and searching variants that can ensure the desirable NPD cost. The project prototyping problem is formulated in terms of a constraint satisfaction problem and implemented using constraint programming techniques. These techniques enable declarative description of the considered problem and effective search strategies for finding admissible solutions. An example illustrates the applicability of the proposed approach for solving an NPD project prototyping problem.