GOALI: A Multidisciplinary Approach to Simultaneous Market Segmentation and Product Family Definition

GOALI奖项的目标是将客户行为模型和产品设计约束整合到一个多学科设计框架中，同时开发基于功能的产品的营销策略和设计家族。从客户品味变化的离散和连续表示中推断市场细分的相对有效性将根据对解决方案质量和计算可追溯性的影响进行评估。关于产品设计约束的信息将用于制定简化优化问题表述的策略。启发式多目标优化技术将被应用于确定产品变体的最佳数量和每个变体的配置。当最优解决方案的特征内容发生变化时，通过估计将客户转移到产品族中的其他变体或竞争对手产品的可能性，可以解释新产品技术部署中固有的不确定性。如果成功，这项研究将重新引导当前对基于市场的最佳产品族设计的思考。这种集成的和特定于环境的方法在平衡市场覆盖范围与工程和制造各种产品变体所产生的运营费用方面提供了固有的优势。这项建议的工作与美国制造企业特别相关，因为他们再也无法负担实施详尽的产品扩散战略。相反，他们必须在战略上有选择性地将产品定位于具有强烈购买动机的明确客户群。此外，通过案例研究问题的综合图书馆的创建、流通和持续发展来传播这项工作，将使整个工程设计研究界受益。学术和工业合作伙伴的合作对项目至关重要？由于现实世界的市场条件和设计约束所遇到的复杂性，因此无法识别和解决。

The objective of the GOALI award is to integrate models of customer behavior and product design constraints in a multidisciplinary design framework to simultaneously develop marketing strategies and design families of feature-based products. The relative effectiveness of inferring market segmentation from discrete and continuous representations of variation in customer tastes will be assessed in terms of impact on both solution quality and computational tractability. Information on product design constraints will be used to develop strategies for simplifying the optimization problem formulation. Heuristic multiobjective optimization techniques will be applied to determine both the optimal number of product variants and the configuration of each variant. The uncertainties inherent in new product technology deployment will be accounted for by estimating the likelihood of diverting customers to other variants in the product family - or to competitors' products - when the feature content of the optimal solution is changed. If successful, this research stands to redirect current thinking on optimal market-based product family design. This integrated and context-specific approach offers inherent advantages in balancing breadth of market coverage against operational expenses incurred in engineering and manufacturing a diverse lineup of product variants. This proposed work is particularly relevant to American manufacturing enterprises as they can no longer afford to implement exhaustive strategies to product proliferation. Instead, they must be strategically selective in targeting products to well-defined customer groups with strong motivations for purchase. Additionally, the dissemination of this work through creation, circulation, and ongoing development of a comprehensive library of case study problems will benefit the entire engineering design research community. Collaboration of academic and industrial partners is essential to the project?s success as the complexities encountered through real-world market conditions and design constraints could not otherwise be identified and addressed.