Virtual Quality Management Elements in Optimized New Product Development Using Genetic Algorithms

The contribution of this paper is placed in the field of vQM (virtual Quality Management) supposing the use of software techniques in product and its manufacturing process planning. The research was focused on laying out a framework, which brought together quality techniques used in competitive design (VOCT, AHP, QFD) and mechanisms inspired by biological evolution (genetic algorithms), achieving in the same time customer oriented development and optimization of new product characteristics. Both quality techniques and genetic algorithm were deployed in the virtual environment based on specialized software tools (Qualica, Genesis). The methodology supposes as stages: ‘Acquiring and ranking customer knowledge’ (VOCT and AHP in identifying customer requirements and their degree of importance); ‘Turning requirements into characteristics’ (cascaded QFD is translating successively customer requirements into technical characteristics of product and its components) and ‘Product optimization’ (genetic algorithm optimizes the component characteristics). The genetic algorithm itself contains several constraints derived either from the customer requirements or product functionality. Thus, each component’s shape, size and fitness is determined by the objective function, formulated within the genetic algorithms code. By complying with the above described framework, each component is optimally designed to constitute a product that will best serve customer needs. The proposed methodology is illustrated on the development of furniture industry products that cover diverse design situation. The product optimization and the objective function derived were focused on minimizing the product mass, implicitly its raw material consumption.