Group multi-criteria design concept evaluation using combined rough set theory and fuzzy set theory

Design concept evaluation is a critical stage in the product development which has significant impact on the downstream process in product development thus on success of new product. Design concept evaluation is widely recognized as a complex multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) problem involving various decision criteria and large amount of data which are usually imprecise and subjective. This paper proposes a new decision-making method to evaluate product design concepts based on the distance between interval vectors each alternative and positive and negative ideal reference vectors. Rank of design concepts is obtained by calculating interval-based relative closeness index for each alternative. In this method, to deal with uncertainty and vagueness of data in the primary phases of product design, performance of design concepts with respect to quantitative and qualitative criteria are concurrently evaluated using rough set and fuzzy set. The weights of criteria used in the evaluation are obtained using the extent analysis method on fuzzy AHP. The efficacy of the method is demonstrated with a numerical example and the results are compared to TOPSIS method. In final, the conclusions of our method are represented and some future directions are proposed to improve the model. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.