Justification of concurrent engineering environments based on fuzzy mathematics

Abstract

This paper presents an approach to justify which combination of concurrent engineering (CE) techniques would be most beneficial to a particular company under a given budget constraint. Existing documents of design change are used to evaluate the effectiveness of each prospective CE technique. An algorithm for computing the combined effectiveness of multiple CE techniques is proposed. Fuzzy set theory has been applied to model the data for cost/benefit analysis, which is imprecise due to subjective judgment.