Theme-Based Comprehensive Evaluation in New Product Development Using Fuzzy Hierarchical Criteria Group Decision-Making Method

One of the features of the digital ecosystem is the integration of human cognition and socio-economic themes into the process of new product development (NPD). In a socio-economic theme-based NPD, ranking a set of product prototypes that have been designed always requires the participation of multiple evaluators and consideration of multiple evaluation criteria. Using the well-being theme-based garment NPD as a background, this paper first presents a fuzzy hierarchical criteria group decision-making (FHCGDM) method which can effectively calculate final ranking results through fusing all assessment data from human beings and machines. It then presents a garment NPD comprehensive evaluation model with hierarchical criteria under the well-being theme through identifying a set of marketing tactics from a consumer acceptance survey. It further provides an establishment process for an NPD evaluation model under the digital ecosystem framework. Finally, a garment NPD case study further demonstrates the proposed well-being NPD comprehensive evaluation model and the FHCGDM method. The advantages of the proposed evaluation method include successfully handling criteria in a hierarchical structure, automatically processing both objective measurements from machines and subjective assessments from human evaluators, and using the most suitable type of fuzzy numbers to describe linguistic terms.