The AHP method as a yacht design support used to determine sailing yacht owners' preferences for deck equipment.

Abstract

Abstract A sailing yacht is a human-centred product which design revolves primarily around the wants and desires of her future owner. These preferences are in most cases immeasurable e.g., the personal aesthetic feeling, a need of comfort, speed, safety etc. The aims of this paper are firstly to demonstrate that these likings can be classified and represented numerically, and secondly to indicate that they correlate with the type of the owned yacht. As a case study, the owners’ preferences regarding deck equipment are considered. They are determined by pairwise comparisons of the grades of importance of features previously defined by the yacht owners, which is a part of the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method used in this study. In result a quantitative representation of a studied preferences is established. Furthermore, they correlate with the type of the operated yacht. The findings of the current study show that the yacht owners’ preferences can be represented numerically, what leads to a utilitarian conclusion that concerns the support and even some degree of automation of the design process.