Integration of Consumer Preferences and Heuristic Knowledge in the Design of Formulated Products: Application to a Cosmetic Emulsion

In this work, an optimization-based methodology to design formulated products, incorporating heuristic rules, property models and also quantified customer preferences, is proposed and applied to a skin moisturizer. The relative importance of each product attribute valued by customers is first quantified and then related parameters progressively incorporated in an optimization-based method that generates plausible alternative formulations. The proposed method can be useful to accelerate the selection among alternative formulations, moreover in a benchmarking process.