A stage characteristic—Preserving product life cycle modeling

The observed patterns of product life cycles indicate the ‘stage’ concerns. Such concerns include stage identification, stage-based strategies and, newly introduced here, stage modeling. Stage modeling, as newly introduced here, is concerned with modeling as well as aggregating individual stages in an overall inter-influence manner. Thus, stage modeling not only preserves the respective characteristics of the stages but also may be explored for the stage-related strategies. To date, this issue has not yet been explored in the PLC literature. This paper proposes an approach to modeling PLCs by addressing the stage characteristic-preserving aspect. The concept and technique of the stage characteristic-preserving modeling are discussed. The new product diffusion model by Bass is demonstrated which is bettered by the presented approach. Further, to illustrate the proposed approach, a numerical example is provided.