Evaluation of New Product Development Alternatives Considering Interrelationships among Decision Criteria

In electronic industry, technologies are progressing rapidly nowadays. To maintain market competition with comparative advantages, an enterprise must continuously develop various new products. This research focuses on the initial stages of the new product development (NPD), which involves generating and screening NPD alternatives. A multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) model considering interrelations among selection criteria is developed. The proposed MCDM model employs the fuzzy Delphi method to filter the performance evaluation criteria. Since the criteria are considered to be interdependent by decision-makers, the gray relation analysis (GRA) is applied to identify the interactive relationships among criteria within each aspect. Two methods are used to calculate the synthetic utility score for each alternative. The first method evaluates the alternatives using an ANP model with relation-structure derived from GRA, whereas the second method rates the alternatives using non-additive fuzzy integral. An empirical example of the medical display monitor industry is provided to show the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed model. The two evaluation methods achieve the same ranking of the alternatives.