This paper presents the use of a multi-agent framework for evaluating parameters of new products and estimating cost of product design. Companies often develop many new product projects simultaneously. A limited budget of research and development imposes selection of the most promising projects. The evaluation of new product projects requires cost estimation and involves many agents that analyse the customer requirements and information acquired from an enterprise system, including the fields of sales and marketing, research and devel- opment, and manufacturing. The model of estimating product design cost is formulated in terms of a constraint satisfaction problem. The illustrative example presents the use of a fuzzy neural network to identify the relationships and esti- mate cost of product design.
['Marcin Relich', 'Pawel Pawlewski']
A Multi-agent Framework for Cost Estimation of Product Design