An Agent-Based Method to Investigate Customers’ Preference in Product Lifecycle

Abstract

Consumer requirements for products vary dynamically based on the change of technologies, social influence, individual taste, etc. A sustainable product should meet customer requirements in its lifecycle. Different methods and techniques have been proposed to find possible changes of product needs or customers’ preferences. This paper introduces an agent-based technique to address the change of product requirements. Major contribution of the proposed method is to embed customers’ preference in the analysis of product performance using agent interactions. Using the combination of Quality Function Deployment (QFD), agent-based modeling and data mining methods, customers’ preference trends related to elements and functions of product are simulated. The prediction period is flexible based on estimated product lifecycle. The proposed method is compared with other techniques in a case study.