The application of case based reasoning to decision support in new product development

Abstract

This paper describes the application of case based reasoning (CBR) to decision support for design managers and engineers during the early phases of new product development projects, in a concurrent engineering environment. The paper discusses the rationale of using CBR, emphasising its suitability for ill‐defined, unstructured problems, in comparison with traditional knowledge‐based systems. The overall research approach is presented, the importance of case collection, case base maintenance and user training is highlighted and the pre‐requisites for effective use of the system are discussed. Finally, the benefits and costs of the CBR system, as perceived by the user companies, are discussed. The experimental nature of the approach is emphasised and it is shown that the industrial environment for which the system is designed and in which it is used has great bearing on its capability.

A fuzzy CBR technique for generating product ideas

“…The applications include architecture design (Trousse & Visser, 1993), mechanical design (Maher & Garza, 1997), and some other design problems. In the CBR applications for product design, existing design architectures/parameters are retrieved to aid the realization of a product function (Bilgic & Fox, 1996;Maher, Balachandran, & Zhang, 1995) or to help engineers develop a new design that could fulfill the downstream requirements (Belecheanu, Pawar, Barson, Bredehorst, & Weber, 2003). These previous CBR studies for product design focus on the engineering aspect -realizing a design for a given functional requirement.…”

A real-time hybrid information-sharing and decision support system for the mould industry

“…The CBR technique is adopted in complicated and unstructured problems in which analyzing information and making decision is difficult. Belecheanu, Pawar, Barson, Bredehorst and Weber (2003) suggested the use of CBR to solve problems in new product development. It is also adopted to construct project delivery strategy so that the project can be delivered on time and within budget (Ribeiro, 2001).…”

Decision‐Making Models and Decision Support

“…Intelligent agents can also be used to provide real-time decision support on airport gate assignment (Lam et al, 2003). Case-based reasoning, which replies on past cases to derive at a decision, has been used by Lari (2003) to assist in making corrective and preventive actions for solving quality problems and by Belecheanu et al (2003) to support decision making on new product development. Genetic algorithms are robust algorithms that can search through large spaces quickly by mimicking the Darwinian "survival of the fittest" law.…”