A QFD-enabled design for manufacturing approach via design knowledge hierarchy and RCE network

In recent years, owing to the rapid changing customer needs and short product life cycle than ever before, employing more effective and flexible approaches for new product development (NPD), product concept development in particular, has become an imperative for a successful product. In this paper, an approach that attempts to improve conventional quality function deployment (QFD) technique in terms of effective design for manufacturing (DFM) in product concept development is proposed and described. For this purpose, a QFD-enabled DFM system was established. It consists of three cohesively-interacting modules, namely, DFM knowledge elicitation module using laddering technique; DFM knowledge representation module using design knowledge hierarchy (DKH); and DFM knowledge organisation module using restricted Coulomb energy (RCE) neural network. A case study on wood golf club design was used to illustrate the performance of the proposed approach. The details of the validation are discussed. From the case study, the prototype QFD-enabled DFM system has demonstrated its effectiveness in DFM knowledge acquisition, representation and organisation at the early stage of NPD.