Integration of concept maturity in decision-making for engineering design: an application to a solar collector development

The presence of immature concepts makes decision-making difficult in upstream phases of a development project. A company’s enthusiasm to improve product performance by exploring novel concepts is hampered by a low maturity that results in an inherent risk of cost overruns and schedule delays. Besides this, decisions taken during conceptual design phases have a critical impact on product life-cycle cost. In this context, a useful practice is to develop two or more concepts in parallel and delay decision-making until sufficient knowledge is generated. Even so, a preliminary screening of concepts is usually needed because of the substantial resources and time required for the development activities. In this paper, a concept screening approach is proposed at the conceptual design phase on the basis of two metrics. The first assesses risk related to the non-completion of design criteria while respecting available time (consideration of deadline) and company resources. The second metric assesses the expected performance of novel concepts compared with the existing products. It uses preference functions and generalized ordered weighted averaging operators. Fuzzy logic tools are used in the two metrics to capture and propagate imprecision in the description of design and external environment. In order to prove its value, the proposed approach was applied to the development of a solar collector in an industrial environment.