APPLYING ASSOCIATION-RULE TECHNIQUES AND ARTIFICIAL NEURAL NETWORKS TO PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT

Abstract

With the help of advanced technology, product life cycle becomes shorter and shorter. Concurrent Engineering (CE), contrast to Sequential Engineering, is a product development paradigm that considers all product life cycle activities at a time to shorten design phase and lower the cost. The activities include manufacturing, assembling, reliability, and recycling. Although CE can condense time-to-market and increases competitiveness of new products, it is found that current CE practice is not enough in customer-oriented design, so the design of product can't satisfy customers' requirements. To solve the described problems, this research applies association rule technique to analyze the customer's preference from different product combination of current market. Meanwhile, since the customer purchase data occurred constantly, this research applies Neural Networks to integrate old rules with new rules. Proposed method has been successfully implemented in cellular phone design case. It is believed that the system can feedback dynamic market information to an enterprise to achieve the goal of Quick Response (QR).