Customer-driven conceptual design for mid-sized passenger aircraft

Customer requirements used in the decision-making at early stage of design process is critically important but easily outdated in ever changing market places due to unstable global economic factors. These uncertain factors that have not been considered in a product design often negatively affect the product market performance at the time point of product introduction. To solve this critical problem, we propose a framework for strategic product design, in which designers may predict product market performance of their own product concepts at a targeted market and time with given levels of product attributes and predicted levels of economic factors. Conceptual design of mid-sized passenger aircraft is employed as a validation example in this work. Trends of customer preferences among three main aircraft attributes (number of seats, range, and speed) affected by oil price and interest rates are modeled based on historical sales data of existing aircraft models for 12 years.