Application of MCDM in the Earlier Stages of the PDP

Abstract

The market demands have pushed the industries to create products to be more innovative and with less time to launch. This situation pressures the entire product life cycle, from its design and manufacturing to the delivery to the market, requiring greater speed and precision in each of these phases. The first stage of the cycle affected by this trend is the development of new products, an interactive, complex engineering and decision-making process. In this sense, it is necessary to know the main agents and actors involved in this process of developing new products and how they interact with each other so that, with this understanding, it is possible to determine the main uncertainties to be mitigated within the earlier stages and avoid potential risk for the subsequent phases of the PDP. By using the PROMETHEE (Preference Ranking Organization Method for Enrichment Evaluation) and GAIA (Geometrical Analysis for Interactive Aid) methods, this paper proposes a comparative model selecting the main components of the product development process, indicating how the interaction between them may minimize the uncertainties in the earlier stages of the PDP.