Quantitative assessment of product value and change risk analysis in early design process

Many products that we see in our daily life are designed through modifications to existing products. The ever changing trends in current markets, along with customers' rising demands for quality, require many companies to make frequent changes to create new products. Due to the challenges in product modification, many companies have adopted a strategy of adaptive design to create new designs by incrementally improving the existing ones.;The assessment of different design solutions is performed by comparing the obtained performance metrics with those from the original design. The system allows the recalculation of these performance metrics when engineering change occurs during the creation of new design solutions. The system then provides an estimate of the change in required resources and expected benefits through comparative analysis. Through these means, the proposed tool aims to help project managers identify an optimal design solution.;The main goal of the proposed model is to increase product knowledge in the early stages of design to support project managers and design engineers in their decision making process. This is achieved through the visualization of the effects of engineering changes. In this thesis, the details of the proposed decision support system (DSS) are described and illustrated with a simple example of a thermoflask.;This thesis develops a decision support system which helps product development managers to assess project performance metrics, such as development effort, development time, product cost and revenue, customer satisfaction, profit margin, and risk. The proposed model is a specialized calculator which integrates house of quality (HOQ), functional analysis system technique (FAST), risk assessment, product complexity analysis, and change propagation analysis to provide an overview of the design process from product attributes and design risk to cost and effort.