Similarity Assessment of the Engineering Concepts: Decision‐Making Support and Metrics

ABSTRACT The new product development (NPD) process is a systematic approach to bring new products and innovations to market. Nowadays, this process is affected by a number of influencing factors associated with the fast‐paced technological changes. One of those factors is the distributed design nature of product development activities: team members are spread geographically having different cultures, languages, time zones, and level of digital engineering tools awareness and utilization. Another factor is the customization of the products to meet the requirements of different customers, or the different requirements of the same customer for product variants. This is linked to the need of being able to predict the next generation of products. All those factors influence the embodiment of the engineering concept into the final product. What is critically important in such an engineering environment is to properly encode and track the engineering concepts to enable smooth planning and management of the next generations of products. One of the critical needs in this process is the assessment of the engineering concepts’ similarities. This paper presents a method for the similarity assessment of product concepts through the integration of the decision‐making support and mathematical representation of similarity scores. To demonstrate its utility, the proposed approach is applied to seven alternative suborbital spaceflight concepts. Using the proposed method, the pairwise similarity score among them is calculated quantitatively. A practical utility of the paper is that it presents an approach to evaluate product concepts’ similarity in any industrial and business sector.