Search

A functional–commercial analysis strategy is proposed to facilitate customer-oriented and human-centric product concept generation and selection. First, general sorting is utilized to elicit the initial product platform, which is then used to generate initial design options of a specific product. After that, designers contribute importance ratings on the functional–commercial criteria with regard to the design options, which are elicited using repertory grids. In order to make a trade-off between cost- and time-related concerns, these ratings are first employed to reduce the number of initially acquired design options, and then used as the input features to the restricted coulomb energy (RCE) neural network. The RCE network is first used for classifying these design options into different patterns, i.e. cost–time pair. The classification results can subsequently serve as the bases for the selection of the preferred design options. A case study on wood golf club design is conducted to demonstrate the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes an approach for query reformulation based on the generation of appropriate query-biased concepts. Query-biased concepts are generated from retrieved documents using their content and structure. In this paper, we focus on three aspects of the concept generation; the selection of query-biased concepts from retrieved documents, the effect of the structure, and the number of retrieved documents used for generating the concepts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]