A fuzzy ontology-based support for multi-criteria decision-making in collaborative product development

One of the most critical decision points in collaborative product development is final design concept selection. This crucial stage is considered as a complicated multi-criteria decision-making problem which affects not only the subsequent design stages but the whole product lifecycle and supply chain. In fact, in addition to the fact that it is a knowledge intensive based phase, the information manipulated at this stage is mainly subjective and imprecise. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to propose a new fuzzy-ontology based approach to handle the vagueness and subjectivity in design concept evaluation and to support the decision making process at this phase. A case study is given to demonstrate the potential of the proposed methodology.