Product development in a multicriteria context

Product development is to find a synthesis of ingredients that result in a marketable and profitable commodity. Profitable commodities should be of special interest to a producer for economic reasons: what is the lowest cost product that fulfills a customer’s specifications? Further, a commodity is marketable if it exhibits certain sometimes very specific characteristics that customers want, often calling for highly customized products that may have never been created before. Product designers are faced with the challenge to create such solutions with a low budget for laboratory experiments. The workflow we have implemented in the Qritos system and introduced here assists a designer with all of the above challenges. It is a multicriteria decision-making support system that ultimately provides the designer with a deep understanding of the product to be created.