Unlocking the power of big data analytics in new product development: An intelligent product design framework in the furniture industry

New product development to enhance companies' competitiveness and reputation is one of the leading activities in manufacturing. At present, achieving successful product design has become more difficult, even for companies with extensive capabilities in the market, because of disorganisation in the fuzzy front end (FFE) of the inno-vation process. Tremendous amounts of information, such as data on customers, manufacturing capability, and market trend, are considered in the FFE phase to avoid common flaws in product design. Because of the high degree of uncertainties in the FFE, multidimensional and high-volume data are added from time to time at the beginning of the formal product development process. To address the above concerns, deploying big data ana-lytics to establish industrial intelligence is an active but still under-researched area. In this paper, an intelligent product design framework is proposed to incorporate fuzzy association rule mining (FARM) and a genetic al-gorithm (GA) into a recursive association-rule-based fuzzy inference system to bridge the gap between customer attributes and design parameters. Considering the current incidence of epidemics, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, communication of information in the FFE stage may be hindered. Through this study, a recursive learning scheme is established, therefore, to strengthen market performance, design performance, and sustain-ability on product design. It is found that the industrial big data analytics in the FFE process achieve greater flexibility and self-improvement mechanism on the evolution of product design.

Automated summary

New product development is crucial for enhancing the competitiveness and reputation of manufacturing companies. However, achieving successful product design has become more challenging due to disorganisation in the early stages of the innovation process. This study proposes an intelligent product design framework that incorporates fuzzy association rule mining and genetic algorithm to bridge the gap between customer attributes and design parameters. By deploying big data analytics and establishing an industrial intelligence system, companies can achieve greater flexibility and self-improvement in product design.