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quality at minimal cost should be enterprises' motto. It has been assessed that 85% of
problems with new products not working as they should, taking too long to bring to the
market, or costing too much, are the result of a poor design process (Ullman, 2003). Thus,
designers are often under pressure as they have to justify management's trust in new
product also supported with diverse tools for selecting and evaluating the projects (Palcic &
Lalic, 2009).
Product development is complex engineering process. The designer is progressing through
the process dealing with many design and manufacturing problems, while envisage the
production process (Vidal et al., 2005), product assembly, parts' maintenance, their influence
on the environment or some other design aspects. Nevertheless, the designer's focus is on
product's function where its form, materials and manufacturing processes are of equal
importance beside it. In addition, the engineer has to define the new product features like
tolerances, type of surface or material, from which the product will be produced. To solve
these dilemmas, he or she has to rely upon own knowledge or experiences as existing
Computer Aided Design (CAD) application does not provide any recommendations or
guidelines.
Current CAD offers support during a great deal of engineering steps when designing a new
product. CAD applications correspond to the designer's work at drafting, drawing,
modelling, assembling, analysing and simulating. Its limitations appear, when having to
accept certain determinations and decisions about the product. This is very important as the
following steps of the process are directly or indirectly dependent on these decisions. In
other words, the process is a sequence of interdependent events and one decision at the
early design stage would then exert influence on all successive events, and the final design
solution.
2.1 Decision-making in product development process
A product development process is above all a decision making process. The engineer has to
choose the proper tools when performing the design process, such as selecting the adequate
software for the initial problem and, more importantly, he or she has to make several
decisions whilst working with these tools, in order to achieve an optimal solution. Human
cognition plays the key role in product development, as knowledge domain is decisive
during decision making process.
Experiences are an engineer's main advantage. Designers are in uncomfortable position
here as at the beginning of their careers their experiences are limited. The possibility of
acquiring experts' opinions is desirable, since they possess knowledge of specific design
aspects and could contribute to the evaluation of possible design solutions. Moreover
SMEs' often have quite such absence of knowledge due to economic capability required
for hiring the specialists. This observation leads to the conclusion that adequate computer
support is often needed for offering some advice and guidelines to designers during
product development process. Such computer support for the decision process can be
provided by the intelligent decision support system, presented in this chapter.
2.2 ”Design for X” methodology
Within product development process, designers face many dilemmas linked with various
aspects of the product, material selection being among them. It is one of its crucial decisions
and is associated with many design and manufacturing problems, usually affected by basic
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