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A key enabler for personalised product design is an open product architecture that allows the integration of personalised modules to create unique products. Decisions regarding product variety, module combinations, and configurations for personalised modules need to be coordinated with the decisions of manufacturing process and supplier selection when developing personalised product architectures. Conventionally, product architecture, processes, and suppliers are independently determined at different product development stages. However, this sequential design process lacks connection between product architecture, process, and supplier, and may lead to suboptimal or even infeasible design solutions with compromised performance. In this study, a concurrent optimisation approach is proposed to integrate manufacturing process and supplier selection into personalised product architecture design. A cost model is developed as a nexus of product architecture, process, and supplier. Then, a mixed-integer optimisation model is established to maximise the potential profit of a product family based on a profit formulation that incorporates customer preference, process resource, supplier, and manufacturing cost. A genetic algorithm is utilised to solve this optimisation problem. The method is demonstrated on the architecture design for a family of personalised bicycles. The result shows that concurrent optimisation can achieve design solutions with higher profitability compared to sequential design strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modularization has played a significant role in product design and system configuration for both manufacturers and customers. Modularization enables mass customization, collaborative product design, concurrent engineering, and short product development cycle from the view point of manufacturers, while it enables high reusability, easy system configuration, and quick installation of parts from the viewpoint of customers. One of the key enablers of modularization is standardized interfaces that connect parts. The standardization has facilitated computational product design by enabling the automation of product design processes. As technology evolves, challenges from the variants of standardized interfaces, such as different versions of an interface, have emerged. A version mismatch causes incompatibility. In order to increase compatibility, interfaces are designed to support backward compatibility. This paper proposes an artificial intelligence planning–based mathematical framework for computational system configuration to support backward compatibility. The case study shows the significance of the design with the consideration of backward compatibility by demonstrating the capability of the proposed framework that automatically discovers a better design solution that cannot be identified when backward compatibility is not considered. Finally, experiments are conducted to prove the optimality of the solutions from the mathematical framework and to showcase the advantages of the framework. The proposed mathematical framework is expected to serve as a benchmarking tool, in terms of solution quality and time, for heuristic methods to be developed in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To show the unique charm of Jiangxi's traditional culture, it is of great importance to apply Jiangxi's unique red culture to products' creative designs. This paper aims to apply Kansei Engineering (KE) and interactive genetic algorithm (IGA) to extract the apparent symbol elements of Jiangxi red culture and then transform them into the creative watch design with modern culture. First of all, KE is used to extract customers' emotional resonance to red culture, and 16 pairs of Kansei image vocabulary pairs are preliminarily collected. The theory of semiotics is used to extract symbols such as shapes, colors, and patterns from the perspective of Jiangxi's red architecture. Secondly, through the designers' subjective aesthetic thinking, these cultural symbols are broken up and reconstructed, thus forming the morphological deconstruction table combined with the case of the watch. Finally, IGA is implemented to code and decode the cultural symbols, thus building a product form's evolutionary design system. Through biological genetic manipulation, cultural symbols of refinement, particularity, and regionality are retained. Then these superior cultural genes are integrated into the innovation of the watch to get creative products with the characteristics of Jiangxi red culture. The model proposed in this paper optimizes the decision-making process of cultural creative product design, and also explores a sustainable development path of culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Product design is crucial for product success. Many approaches can improve product design quality, such as concurrent engineering and design for X. This study focuses on applying product usage information (PUI) during product development. As emerging technologies become widespread, an enormous amount of product-related information is available in the middle of a product's life, such as customer reviews, condition monitoring, and maintenance data. In recent years, the literature describes the application of data analytics technologies such as machine learning to promote the integration of PUI during product development. However, as of today, PUI is not efficiently exploited in product development. One of the critical issues to achieve this is identifying and integrating task-relevant PUI fit for purposes of different product development tasks. Nevertheless, preparing task-relevant PUI that fits different product development tasks is often ignored. This study addresses this research gap in preparing task-relevant PUI and rectifies the related shortcomings and challenges. By considering the context in which PUI is utilized, this paper presents a systematic procedure to help identify and specify developers' information needs and propose relevant PUI fitting the actual information needs of their current product development task. We capitalize on an application scenario to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under the trend of concurrent engineering, the correspondence between functions and physical structures in product design is gaining importance. Between the functions and parts, connectors are the basic unit for engineers to consider. Moreover, the relationship between connector-liaison-part will help accomplish the integration of information. Such efforts will help the development of the Knowledge Intensive CAD (KICAD) system. Therefore, we proposed a Connector-liaison-part-based disassembly sequence planning (DSP) in this study. First, the authors construct a release diagram through an interference relationship to express the priority of disassembly between parts. The release diagram will allow designers to review the rationality of product disassembly planning. Then, the cost calculation method and disassembly time matrix are established. Last, the greedy algorithm is used to find an appropriate disassembly sequence and seek suggestions for design improvement. Through the reference information, the function and corresponding modules are improved, from which the disassembly value of a product can be reviewed from a functional perspective. In this study, a fixed support holder is used as an example to validate the proposed method. The discussion of the connector-liaison-part will help the integration of the DSP and the functional connector approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our aim was to discover the most important factors that influence the development of greener products in the mechanical industry, emphasising green design in product creation based on current environmental issues and considering product development as one important aspect of product life cycle management. This model is important to the mechanical industry because this sector relies heavily on raw materials, and recycling products is one way to improve environmental conditions. We used exploratory factor analyses to assess new product development, communication in change management, concurrent engineering, green products design worries and supplier involvement risks perception. The factor analyses initially found 10 constructs, but the 10th was eliminated because it had only one variable, and 5 were eliminated because they yielded Cronbach’s alpha values less than 0.6. To develop this model, we sent questionnaires to 2000 professionals in the Brazilian mechanical industry through LinkedIn discussion groups, mostly to professionals who participated in product development and was received 405 answered questionnaires which 394 was considered valid. The results show the importance of consistently managing product development throughout the entire product life cycle. This includes aspects such as product recycling, green products and using materials that are easy to recycle, from the very beginning of product design. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Design for additive manufacturing (AM) involves decision making in various design domains, including product design, material selection, and process planning. In practice, engineers typically adopt a sequential design process to optimize these design domains in consecutive order. However, coupling factors, e.g. shared variables, related constraints, and conflicting objectives, are not sufficiently considered within the sequential design process, resulting in an inefficient workflow and suboptimal design solutions. To address the above issues, this paper proposes a multidisciplinary design optimization framework to simultaneously optimize different domains, which enables rapid exploration and complete exploitation of the AM design space under complex constraints. More specifically, the proposed framework is based on the concurrent optimization method, which coordinates the optimization of different design domains by allowing an automated exchange of design information. Also, the framework utilizes the surrogate modeling approach to approximate high-fidelity simulations for facilitating the iterative process. The effectiveness of the proposed framework is validated with two examples, a plate with a hole design and a hook design, which involve multiple design objectives from both process and structure domains, i.e. the print time, print area, strain energy, and maximum von Mises stress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Concurrent engineering is a product development approach in which engineers simultaneously design products and processes to improve customer satisfaction, enhance product quality, and reduce product costs. While various design methodologies have been proposed to support concurrent engineering, development of a systematic methodology that comprehensively integrates product and process design is still an ongoing research need. Traditional design for assembly (DFA) has been extended to concurrently design subassemblies and assembly sequences; however, the optimum assembly sequence depends on the efficiency of the assembly line and how assembly tasks are assigned to workstations without causing extensive idle time. This study extends past approaches in the concurrent design of products and processes by integrating assembly line balancing, assembly line design, and sensitivity analysis of assembly line design in addition to assembly line sequencing. In particular, this study proposes an approach to simultaneously design products and processes by integrating (1) a liaison diagram augmented with additional information on the type of liaisons (e.g., screw fixing, snap fitting, or contacting) to find stable subassemblies and corresponding assembly tasks, (2) assembly sequencing to generate all feasible assembly sequences that satisfy requirements for stable subassembly, (3) assembly line balancing to identify all possible assignments of tasks to workstations and to find corresponding cycle times and utilization, (4) assembly line designs that include the types and number of assembly lines for each product design, and (5) sensitivity analysis to evaluate the robustness of the assembly line design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to expedite the process of introducing a product to market, organisations have shifted their paradigm towards concurrent engineering. This involves the simultaneous execution of successive activities on the basis of information available in rudimentary form. For this, cross-functional teams sporadically communicate to exchange available updated information at the cost of augmented time and money. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to present a model-based methodology to estimate the optimal amount of overlapping and communication policy with a view to minimising the product development cycle time at the lowest additional cost. In the first step of the methodology, an objective function comprising the cycle time and the cost of the complete project is formulated mathematically. To reach the optimal solution, a novel meta-heuristic, non-discrete ant colony optimisation, is proposed. The algorithm derives its governing traits from the traditional ant algorithms over a discrete domain, but has been modified to search results in a continuous search space. The salient feature of the proposed meta-heuristic is that it utilises the weighted sum of numerous probability distribution functions (PDFs) to represent the long-term pheromone information. This paper utilises a novel approach for pheromone maintenance to adequately update the PDFs after each tour by the ants. The performance of the proposed algorithm has been tested on a hypothetical illustrative example of mobile phones and its robustness has been authenticated against variants of particle swarm optimisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Product family design is currently facing a multitude of challenges, the main problem stemming from the diversity offered to consumers. To design a product family, designers have to define an efficient bill of materials which ensures product assembly within a predefined length of time in order to satisfy the synchronised delivery principle. In addition, the modules used to assemble the finished products have to be competitive in terms of logistical costs. The ability to anticipate the constraints associated with the production process and with transportation is consequently of great interest. In this paper, we focus on the process of identifying a set of modules to be used in the assembly of the finished product. The objective is to define the bill of materials for each product from the modules belonging to that set, and to assign these modules to distant facilities where they will be manufactured and then shipped to a nearby facility for final assembly within a specific time. We use a set partitioning formulations to represent the problem, and solve it by adapting a Tabu Search algorithm in which the assembly process and the supply chain design are considered at the same time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a mathematical programming technique to optimize the product development process. Using a concurrent engineering approach, the paper presents a formulation that maps the different stages of product development. The decision variables of these stages are then determined simultaneously. While the Quality Function Deployment Technique (QFD) is based on a qualitative sequential approach, this paper proposes a holistic quantitative approach to concurrent product-process optimization. The mathematical programming technique is applied to the first two stages of product development: the optimization of customer satisfaction and the product's design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to facilitate product realisation processes, presently, research is actively being carried out to develop methodologies and technologies to support geographically dispersed teams to organise collaborative design based on the quickly evolving information technologies. A number of research works and commercial systems have appeared to provide solutions for collaborative and distributed product development, and the practical applications are getting more pervasive and mature. In this paper, the recently related works are summarised from three aspects - visualisation-based collaborative systems, co-design collaborative systems and CE (concurrent engineering)-based collaborative systems. Around these aspects, about 100 papers and 30 commercial systems/international standards published or launched recently are discussed. The current research and development statuses and issues, underlying algorithms, mechanisms and system architectures, and the future trends and challenges are explained and compared in detail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Concurrent Engineering aims to incorporate the overlapping of processes in order to reduce its time-to-market and thereby sustain the existence of organizations in increasingly competitive times. Although faster product design, development, and delivery are the intended outcomes of concurrent engineering, one of the undesirable by-products is an increase in risks as a consequence of uncertainties between interdependent processes. Hence, the risks need to be identified, assessed, and mitigated together with concurrent engineering considerations for the elimination of the ‘domino-effect’ within risk management. This paper concentrates primarily on knowledge elicitation techniques that were used to provide information to the Intelligent Risk Mapping and Assessment System (IRMAS™) to identify, prioritise, analyse, and assist project managers to manage perceived sources of CE risks. Techniques such as expert interviews, brainstorming, the Delphi technique, and the analogy process are discussed in relation to compiling the knowledge used for this expert system. A total of 589 risk items were identified for different project types, and information on 4372 items and 136 lessons learned were collected from experts at HdH. The core of the research is a reasoning methodology used for Knowledge Elicitation of a Risk Mapping and Assessment System which will not only support the decision-making process of the user but also aid the knowledge retrieval, storage, sharing, and updating process of manufacturing organizations. This research provides a systematic engineering approach to risk management of concurrent product and process development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Concurrent engineering has become a popular approach to product development among manufacturing companies. A lively debate has recently arisen upon whether the technique may be conveniently applied under all circumstances, or whether, in some cases, it may be inferior to other approaches, including the traditional sequential one. The paper proposes an analytical model of concurrent engineering and shows that the main, although not the only, determinants in suggesting the optimal allocation of product and process design effort are the 'evolution speeds' of product and process parameters. Evolution speed indicates whether the major part of design uncertainty is reduced early or late in the design process and, among other factors, is related to the problem's innovative content. It is eventually found that concurrent engineering is optimal in the case of routine design and when the process characteristics are not critical. Under other circumstances other three patterns, termed 'sequential', 'process first' and 'co-operative R&D', appear to be superior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to make people's lives more convenient and enhance living standards, the composition of a product usually includes more than one component. However, a product is created by the joint endeavor of people from various territories and therefore one of the important considerations is making a product merge into consumers' daily lives rather than simply fulfilling its functions. There might be conflicts with people's existing life patterns or existing values, which should be taken into consideration during the manufacturing process. This study is an investigation of the process of assembly by considering the assembly operations and the assembly operating time. By determining the relationship between components, the assembly concept of most components was analyzed. A fuzzy comprehensive evaluation was carried out during the evaluation of the degree of complexity of user operations. Depending on the ranking of membership, the most appropriate assembly was determined and this serves as a reference for designers to select the optimal product assembly. By recording the consumer usage models, the optimal assembly and usage model of product design were also proposed. The goal of this study is to find the balance between assembly evaluation and user usage model by the process in order to allow designers to determine the new assembly concepts that meet consumer usage models. A case study of four bedside stereos was carried out by implementing the proposed approach in order to determine the evaluation principle of assembly. The purpose of this is to enhance the balance between assembly design and user operation complexity for making efficient decisions. A product design can comply with the spirit of concurrent engineering and the quality of a product design can be enhanced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Industry requires CAE systems of the future to he highly flexible and to provide support on multiple levels: assisting the activities both of individual engineers and of complete product design teams. The CAE. system must provide accurate, consistent information to all users. It should also actively promote exchange of information and knowledge between team members. In outline an architecture for CAE systems of the future is proposed, and the purpose and structure of the various elements of this architecture are discussed. In particular a specialist, supervisory, co-ordinator application, called the Engineering Moderator is introduced in detail, and its performance requirements specified. This application addresses some fundamental requirements for provision of support for team working in a concurrent engineering environment, by encouraging and facilitating communication between team members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Manufacturability evaluation of the features on a part for machining is a popular research topic due to the rising concern over effective product design in the Concurrent Engineering and CIM concepts. Many of the currently available manufacturability evaluation systems, however, require specialized expertise and inference and/or analysis methods, such as statical tolerance analysis, cutting force analysis, etc., which may be time-consuming and would require a considerable amount of specialized knowledge that is not directly available to the designers. Many of these systems that are rule-based, formalize the ill-defined boundaries of the operations' capabilities using precise production rules. In addition, the manufacturability evaluation of a part is usually performed after the part has been designed. However, manufacturability evaluation must become an integral part of the design process to truly integrate design and manufacturing. Set-up planning, which is a macro-planning process in both process planning and fixture planning, plays a key role in achieving this integration. The requirements in both process planning and fixturing are considered, as a set-up plan is formulated in set-up planning. Through the consideration of these requirements, manufacturability evaluation can be performed and design elements that might cause problems in the machining and work-holding of a part can be identified. In this paper, a practical and useful intelligent fuzzy set-up planner that is capable of performing manufacturability and fixturability evaluations is presented. This system employs machinability data and machining heuristics that are commonly practised on the shop floor for assessing the manufacturability of features. Fuzzy set representations and reasoning are used in the representation of the operations and features relations, and in the operations selection and set-up planning procedures in this system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a well-known engineering practice, concurrent engineering (CE) considers all elements involved in a product’s life cycle from the early stages of product development, and emphasizes executing all design tasks simultaneously. As a result, there exist various complex design problems in CE, which usually have many design parameters or require different disciplinary knowledge to solve them. To address these problems and enable concurrent design, different methods have been developed. The original problem is usually divided into small subproblems so that each subproblem can be solved individually and simultaneously. However, good decomposition, optimization, and communication strategies among subproblems are still needed in the field of CE. This paper attempts to study and analyze cooperative co-evolution (CC) based design optimization in CE by employing a parallel CC framework. Furthermore, it aims to develop new concurrent design methods based on parallel CC to solve different kinds of CE problems. To achieve this goal, a new novelty-driven CC is developed for design problems with complex structures and a novel concurrent design method is presented for quasi-separable multidisciplinary design optimization (MDO) problems. The efficacy of the new methods is studied on universal electric motor design problems and a general MDO problem, and compared to that of some existing methods. Additionally, this paper studies how the communication frequency among subpopulations affects the performance of the proposed methods. The optimal communication frequencies under different communication costs are reported as experimental results for both proposed methods on the test problems. Based on this paper, an effective self-adaptive method is proposed to be used in both optimization schemes, which is able to adapt the communication frequency during the optimization process. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

There is a trend toward increased customization of goods to satisfy a wide range of customers using product platforms. However, there is an erroneous notion that product platforms can only be used to provide economic viability in production thanks to the reuse of physical components among a family of products. Yet, this is a limited perception of the potential of a product platform. In this article, an object-oriented approach to support the development of product platforms is proposed to increase efficiency through reuse and flexibility of designs among a family of products. Two modes of the platform development process are addressed: platform preparation and platform execution. Platform preparation prescribes the methods needed to model platform objects, using enhanced function-means models and set-based concurrent engineering processes. During the platform execution process, sets of design alternatives can be configured concurrently throughout the conceptual, system, and detailed phases of the platform development. Three cases illustrate how the same approach may be used in different design scenarios: design space exploration and extension, supply-chain collaboration, and configure-to-order. The approach supports system architects and design engineers in making design decisions that propel the platform development work by enabling analysis in stages where designs are immature and evaluating the goodness of the alternatives early. Ultimately, product platforms can be efficiently developed for modularity and scalability to find feasible product variants and meet the needs of a multitude of customers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The competitions among manufacturing include development style, method, and procedure. Product design is a kind of high-level thinking activity which has the characteristics of multi-object and without explicit operator. While concurrent engineering can realize product development mode transformation, due to the complexity of concurrent engineering, designer cannot distinguish ontology connotation from denotation. So, it will inevitably encounter various conflicts during collaborative work, such as time conflict, function conflict, quality conflict, and fund conflict. Based on concept view, this article studies the distinguishability of concept ontology. The conceptual level reasons of conflict are analyzed, and standardized descriptions to resource organization and resource utilization are also given. Then, task decomposition, scheduling, and conflict resolution model are presented with constraints of time, resource, and task. Finally, design structure matrix is used to represent concurrent task structure and optimized by row–column transformation. The model is demonstrated with an example from motorcycle engine design, and the results demonstrate that the proposed model is feasible and will help for conflict resolution and task scheduling in concurrent engineering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The trend of smart products is now changing the world and transforming the life of customers. People tend to be more tied to smart, connected products seeking to ease and improve quality of life and find new ways to make things such as daily tasks differently. In this context, the world of clothing has noticed a big advance targeting various applications: sport, gaming, and health monitoring and rehabilitation. Wearable smart products are intelligent hybrid products made of garments, sensor networks, and applications, interacting with users and the environment capable of real-time data processing and storage, with capabilities to extend functionalities by communicating with other things. The multi-functionality property of smart products needs the integration of various electronic parts. High variety of parts with different interfaces makes the development of smart products complex than generic products and requires the involvement and close collaboration of multidisciplinary team (garment designers, sensor networks designers, and application developers). A high number of alternative designs can be considered at the beginning of the design process due to this variety and high availability of parts. The smart product development team needs then to explore multiple candidate solutions before finding the best smart product design that complies with the requirements. This work proposes the set-based concurrent engineering to deal efficiently with the alternatives. Therefore, this article provides a novel approach to shift from set-based concurrent engineering theoretical principles toward a pragmatic (practical) application to wearable smart products taking advantage of product lifecycle management system capabilities for the implementation. The use of product lifecycle management system to support the set-based concurrent engineering process will contribute for a better understanding of the approach avoiding confusions, simplify the architecture of the solution in view of integration with other systems, and enable the stakeholders to focus on the level of innovation of the smart product. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The capability to concurrently design the product and its supply chain is a key competence in manufacturing companies. However, this crucial capability is still underdeveloped because of the lack of practical methodology for concurrent product and supply chain design (CP-SCD) in the industries. Moreover, research has not been able to fill this industrial capability gap partly because there is a lack of convergence of methodologies in the product design and SCD research communities. This paper provides a literature review that unravels undiscovered aspects and gaps of past research in CP-SCD. The findings from the literature review are synthesised into a novel exploratory research framework termed concurrent design attribute – trade-off pyramid that provides propositions for research on CP-SCD methodology. The practicality of this framework is demonstrated by the development of a CP-SCD methodology, which is applied to modularity design. Based on an innovative use of the design structure matrix in modularity design, this methodology also generates useful managerial insights in design trade-off analysis and the classification of product-supply chain systems. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As competition shifts away between competitors to supply chains, simultaneous sharing of technical expertise on product design is key to manufacturing success. Thus, purpose of this study is to examine the mediating effect of concurrent engineering of product design (CEPD) on the relationship between advanced manufacturing technology (AMT) and supply chain performance (SCP). The paper is a cross-sectional study, and data was collected among top managers of manufacturing companies. Cluster and systematic random sampling techniques were used to select the respondents. Structural equation modeling (Amos graphic) was used for analysis. The study found a positive relationship between advanced manufacturing technology and supply chain performance, advanced manufacturing technology and concurrent engineering of product design, and concurrent engineering of product design and supply chain performance. It also concluded that concurrent engineering of product design is a full mediator between advanced manufacturing technology and supply chain performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on changes in design has mainly focused on the product domain, which is the manifestation of the design process. This article investigates changes in the process domain, which describes the execution of coordinated and concurrent design activities through interdisciplinary teams. More specifically, this article focuses on changes in the iterative behavior of activities as one of the key levers determining the performance of complex concurrent design processes. In activity network–based models of design processes, the occurrence of such behavior is often expressed probabilistically through iteration-likelihoods. First, the impact of iteration-likelihood changes on the effort and duration of both individual activities and the overall design process is examined through stochastic analysis. Consequently, a method for the investigation of such changes is developed, which grounds on an experimental approach using Monte Carlo simulation of activity network–based process models. The method is applied to the design process of a high-speed machining device for the manufacturing of planetary-ball-bearing housings. This analysis results in a two-dimensional criticality ranking of potential iteration-likelihood changes and in the identification of the most affected individual activities. The article concludes with managerial implications for process planning and improvement and discusses which design activities need to be targeted by project management to prevent and react to critical iteration-likelihood changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article compares Nash equilibrium and fairness equilibrium of a non-cooperative design problem in which multiple equilibria exist. Nash equilibrium is widely used to study design decisions in non-cooperative design; however, when multiple equilibria exist, behavioral research has found that actual human decisions are not always consistent with Nash equilibrium. Fairness equilibrium has been proposed as a modification to Nash equilibrium by incorporating assessments of fairness in utility functions and has successfully explained why decisions that are not Nash equilibrium may occur. This article studies how engineers’ decisions and design outcomes in fairness equilibrium differ from those in Nash equilibrium. This article illustrates how fairness equilibrium changes with fairness, engineers’ evaluations, and penalty of product failure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Product design is a multidisciplinary activity that requires the integration of concurrent engineering approaches into a design process that secures competitive advantages in product quality. In concurrent engineering, the Taguchi method has demonstrated an efficient design approach for product quality improvement. However, the Taguchi method intuitively uses parameters and levels in measuring the optimum combination of design parameter values, which might not guarantee that the final solution is the most optimal. This work proposes an integrated procedure that involves neural network training and genetic algorithm simulation within the Taguchi quality design process to aid in searching for the optimum solution with more precise design parameter values for improving the product development. The concept of fractals in computer graphics is also considered in the generation of product form alternatives to demonstrate its application in product design. The stages in the general approach of the proposed procedures include: (1) use of the Taguchi experimental design procedure, (2) analysis of the neural network and genetic algorithm process, and (3) generation of design alternatives. An electric fan design is used as an example to describe the development and explore the applicability of the proposed procedures. The results indicate that the proposed procedures could enhance the efficiency of product design efforts by approximately 7.8%. It is also expected that the proposed design procedure will provide designers with a more effective approach to product development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]