C.K. Kwong

• PhD
• The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

The joint optimisation of product design configuration (PDC) for new and remanufactured products involves specification upgrading for parts recovered from used product returns. Reversely, the specification upgrading decision for used parts/modules is also affected by the original specifications selected for parts/modules during the new product desi...

Forecasting the quantity and timing of used product returns is one of the major challenges faced by remanufacturers. Distributed lag model has been proposed in recent years to forecast used product returns based on past sales data. However, the forecasting accuracy of a distributed lag model is affected to a large extent by the estimation of the pa...

During the early stage of product design, product manufacturers seek to identify the most relevant product features that will meet the demands and needs of consumers. Conventionally, several surveys have to be undertaken during the time interval between product design and the launch of anew product, to understand any changes on the importance of th...

To develop a successful product, understanding the relationship between customer satisfaction (CS) and design attributes of a new product is essential. Nowadays IoT technologies are used to collect online review data from social media. More representative CS models are developed using online review data. However, online review data is imbalanced, s...

In previous studies, customer survey data were commonly adopted to perform the modelling of customer satisfaction (CS). However, it could be time-consuming to conduct surveys and obtain their data. On the other hand, respondents’ responses are quite often confined by preset questions. Nowadays, a huge number of customer online reviews on products c...

The increasing need for improving the utilisation of existing nursing staff and better workload distribution has made nursing staff demand modelling and nurse scheduling critical. However, both rely on human experience, often leading to ineffective planning. This study describes the use of cloud computing together with mobile devices for planning t...

Nowadays, product manufacturers commonly establish coordination with members of their distribution channels by making contracts with them. The contract may affect product design to a certain extent. Therefore, manufacturers should consider this in the product planning stage. Some analytical studies have investigated the effect of the contract schem...

Determination of the design attribute settings of a new product is essential for maximizing customer satisfaction. A model is necessary to illustrate the relation between the design attributes and dimensions of customer satisfaction such as product performance, affection and quality. The model is commonly developed based on customer survey data col...

Previous studies mainly employed customer surveys to collect survey data for understanding customer preferences on products and developing customer preference models. In reality, customer preferences on products could change over time. Thus, the time series data of customer preferences under different time periods should be collected for the modell...

In this paper, based on more than ten years' studies on this dedicated research thrust, a comprehensive review concerning information mining from big consumer opinion data in order to assist product design is presented. First, the research background and the essential terminologies regarding online consumer opinion data are introduced. Next, studie...

In recent years, remanufacturing has received increased attention as a sustainable and profitable product recovery strategy. To facilitate the remanufacturing of used product returns, factors which affect remanufacturability should be considered during the product design stage. The selection of fastening method during the product design stage is on...

Fuzzy regression analysis was extensively used in previous studies to model the relationships between dependent and independent variables in a fuzzy environment. Various approaches have been proposed to perform fuzzy regression analysis with most of the approaches adopting a single objective function in the generation of fuzzy regression models. So...

Concern has been expressed globally about nursing staff turnover and shortage. Due to the worldwide ageing population, concern for nursing shortage is further growing. Literature suggests various reasons for and consequences of nursing shortage. This study consists of two main parts. Firstly, a systematic literature search and review is employed to...

Minimizing cargo handling time and waiting time of ship are some of the most critical tasks for terminal operators during berth allocation planning. An efficient and effective berth allocation planning approach is not only significant for improving a terminal’s productivity but worth even more in enhancing terminal serviceability. As berths are no...

Of landfilled municipal solid waste in Hong Kong, 33.2% is attributed to food waste. The government has set a waste reduction target to reduce by 40% the current food waste disposal at landfills by 2022 and has launched various policies and strategies to achieve this target. The Hong Kong Government is eager to control the utilisation level of food...

Customer satisfaction in purchasing new products is an important issue that needs to be addressed in today's competitive markets. Consumers not only need to be solely satisfied with the functional requirements of a product, and they are also concerned with the affective needs and aesthetic appreciation of the product. A product with good affective...

In this paper, based on more than ten years' studies on this dedicated research thrust, a comprehensive review concerning information mining from big consumer opinion data in order to assist product design is presented. First, the research background and the essential terminologies regarding online consumer opinion data are introduced. Next, studie...

Affective design is an important aspect of new product development that can enhance customer satisfaction of new products. Previous studies generally conducted customer surveys based on questionnaires and interviews to collect customers’ views and preferences of affective design of products. However, the process could be time-consuming and the surv...

Managing product returns has been considered essential in the production planning and control of remanufacturing, as well as in the inventory control management of product returns. Uncertainties in the quantity and quality of returned products collected for remanufacturing could largely affect the profit generated from remanufactured products. Howe...

More e-commerce firms bundle the product with the service and the service uncertainty arising in e-business influences the purchase choice of heterogeneous consumers. Traditional literature assumes the qualities of product or service are distributed at the fixed levels to segment consumers who have the specific preference. In this paper, we adopt u...

Integrating legacy IT assets and new commercial software components together into a flexible IT architecture is one of open challenges facing modern enterprises today. Most of previous studies focused on using re-engineering to improve the flexibility of IT architectures, rather than employing optimization theory in architecture design problem, esp...

Two types of uncertainty, namely, randomness and fuzziness, exist in preference modeling. Fuzziness is mainly caused by human subjective judgment and incomplete knowledge, and randomness often originates from the variability of influences on the inputs and outputs of a preference model. Various techniques have been utilized to develop preference mo...

Previous studies conducted customer surveys based on questionnaires and interviews, and the survey data were then utilized to analyze product features. In recent years, online customer reviews on products became extremely popular, which contain rich information on customer opinions and expectations. However, previous studies failed to properly addr...

Errors on the mathematical model of Mayer et al. (2013) are pointed out and corrected.

Product family design is a popular approach adopted by manufacturers to increase their product varieties in order to satisfy the needs of various markets. In recent years, because of increasing environmental concerns in societies and strict regulations of environmental protection, quite a number of manufacturers adopted remanufacturing strategy in...

With the increasing customer demand on fabric variety in fashion market, fabric texture becomes much more diverse, which brings great challenges to accurate fabric detect detection. In this paper, a fabric inspection model, consisting of image preprocessing, image restoration and thresholding operation, is developed to address the woven fabric defe...

Recently, manufacturers have increasingly begun to sell products bundled with core services. However, customers are inconvenienced by individually returning the product or refunding the service after they have purchased a bundle. This paper presents a return and refund policy under two-stage demand uncertainty (uncertainty at time 0 and inherent un...

Optimisation of product family design has been emphasised and studied for many years. However, previous studies only took overall cost or profit as an optimisation objective, but ignored the supply risk of a product family. Moreover, the discount associated with the bidding price, which is common in practice, was not considered in the modelling. In...

Quality function deployment (QFD) is commonly used in the product planning stage to define the engineering characteristics and target value settings of new products. However, some QFD processes substantially involve human subjective judgment, thus adversely affecting the usefulness of QFD. In recent years, a few studies have been conducted to intro...

Product family design (PFD) is a popular method for increasing product variety to satisfy the needs of diversified markets. With the increasing concern for environmental friendliness in society, more and more companies develop launching remanufactured products and include them in their product families. Therefore, PFD should be considered in a broa...

The authors (Tang et al. (2013) [1] developed a CoFAQ model to formulate a solution for the problem of production strategy decision and reuse scenario selection for a software product family. In the previous research, we stated that the CoFAQ model was a 0–1 mixed integer nonlinear program, where only a local optimal solution might be found. In a r...

In this paper, a defect detection model using optimized Gabor filters, which is suitable for real-time operation, is proposed to tackle the woven fabric inspection problem in fashion industry. Based on the analysis of the particular characteristics of fabric defects, the proposed model utilizes composite differential evolution (CoDE) to optimize th...

In the early stage of product design, particularly for consumer products, affective design, engineering, and marketing issues must be taken into considerationand they are commonly performed respectively by product designers, engineers, and marketing personnel. However, they have different concerns and focuses with regard to the new product design....

Online product reviews contain valuable information regarding customer requirements (CRs). Intelligent analysis of a large volume of online CRs attracts interest from researchers in various fields. However, many research studies only concern sentiment polarity in the product feature level. With these results, designers still need to read a list of...

Differential evolution (DE) is a simple but powerful evolutionary algorithm, which has been widely and successfully used in many areas. In this paper, an impulsive control method is introduced to the DE framework, and the impulsive DE (IpDE) is proposed for improving the performance of DE. The impulsive control operation instantly moves the individ...

Affective design and the determination of engineering specifications are commonly conducted separately in early product design stage. Generally, designers and engineers are required to determine the settings of design attributes (for affective design) and engineering requirements (for engineering design), respectively, for new products. Some design...

The coordination among supply chain partners for product line design (PLD) with consideration of remanufactured products has not been addressed in previous studies. This study aims at studying the coordination among a manufacturer, and supply chain partners using a game theoretical model for design of product lines that contain both new and remanuf...

In this paper, we investigate the problem of time series forecasting using single hidden layer feedforward neural networks (SLFNs), which is optimized via multiobjective evolutionary algorithms. By utilizing the adaptive differential evolution (JADE) and the knee point strategy, a nondominated sorting adaptive differential evolution (NSJADE) and it...

Remanufactured products are normally remanufactured from returned new products. Thus, they can be considered together with new products in product line design to obtain the maximum profit and market share of the product line. This paper proposes a methodology for optimal product line design with simultaneous consideration of remanufactured and new...

Product family design optimization is an important decision task in the early stages of product development. The extant optimization models for product family design assume that the known information for modeling can be determined precisely. However, many collected information for product design are prone to be imprecise due to the inherent uncerta...

Faced with fierce competition in marketplaces, manufacturers need to determine the appropriate settings of engineering characteristics of the new products so that the best customer preferences of the products can be obtained. To achieve this, functional models relating customer preferences to engineering characteristics need to be developed. As inf...

Affective design is an important aspect of new product development, especially for consumer products, to achieve a competitive edge in the marketplace. It can help companies to develop new products that can better satisfy the emotional needs of customers. However, product designers usually encounter difficulties in determining the optimal settings...

Kraus and Yano (2003) established the share-of-surplus product line optimisation model and developed a heuristic procedure for this nonlinear mixed-integer optimisation model. In their model, price of a product is defined as a continuous decision variable. However, because product line optimisation is a planning process in the early stage of produc...

Family Mould Cavity Runner Layout Design (FMCRLD) is the most demanding and critical task in the early Conceptual Mould Layout Design (CMLD) phase. Traditional experience-dependent manual FCMRLD workflow causes long design lead time, non-optimum designs and human errors. However, no previous research can support FMCRLD automation and optimisation....

In this paper, we discuss t-norm extension operations of general binary operation for fuzzy true values on a linearly ordered set, with a unit interval and a real number set as special cases. On the basis of it, t-norm operations of type-2 fuzzy sets and properties of type-2 fuzzy numbers are discussed.

Quality function deployment (QFD) is a widely adopted customer-oriented methodology to assist in product design and development. In a traditional QFD-based product planning process, the importance weights of customer requirements (CRs) in house of quality are obtained by analyzing and generalizing the requirements of various customers, and the purp...

Rough set (RS)- and particle swarm optimization (PSO)- based adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) approaches are proposed to generate customer satisfaction models in affective design that address fuzzy and nonlinear relationships between affective responses and design attributes. The RS theory is adopted to reduce the number of fuzzy rules...

Today's apparel industry must respond to an ever-changing fashion market. Just-in-time production is a must-go direction. The apparel industry generates more production orders, which are split into smaller jobs to provide customers with timely and customized fashion products. Production planning is even more challenging if the due times of producti...

The success of a new product is very much related to the customer satisfaction level of the product. Therefore, it is important to estimate the customer satisfaction level of a new product in its design stage. Quality function deployment is commonly used to develop customer satisfaction models for product design. Relationships between customer sati...

Selection of appropriate suppliers is an important decision task for enterprises. In literature papers, supplier selection is only considered from the view of components or parts, and evaluation of the overall outsourcing cost and supply risk is not considered from the view of product as a whole. In addition, the traditional process of supplier sel...

Due to the fact that wine is highly sensitive to storage conditions such as temperature and humidity, it is a challenging task for a regional distribution hub to provide reliable wine storage facilities for maintaining wine quality during storage. This is especially true when an incident occurs unexpectedly that violates the criteria of suitable st...

One of the core problems in software product family (SPF) is the coordination of product building and core asset development, specifically the integration of production strategy decision and core asset scenario selection. In the current paper, a model of Cost Optimization under Functional And Quality (CoFAQ) goal satisfaction constraints is develop...

With the economic globalization and market constantly subdivision, the life cycle of product and the development cycle increasingly shorter. In the development process of new products, more and more scholars have realized that if suppliers collectively participate in the initial stage of product development, enterprises will effectively save the co...

This paper presents a supplier selection and order allocation (SSOA) model to solve the problem of a multiperiod supplier selection and then order allocation in the environment of short product life cycle and frequent material purchasing, for example, fast fashion environment in apparel industry. At the first stage, with consideration of multiple d...

Affective design is an important aspect of product development to achieve a competitive edge in the marketplace. A neural-fuzzy network approach has been attempted recently to model customer satisfaction for affective design and it has been proved to be an effective one to deal with the fuzziness and non-linearity of the modeling as well as generat...

In traditional product development process, supplier selection is performed in the production stage when the product design stage has finished. Recently, some scholars found that decoupling the supplier selection and product design may lead to infeasible or suboptimal solutions, and a number of research papers proposed methods integrating supplier...

In most studies related to product positioning, probabilistic consumer choice rules assume that a product always gains some market share no matter how small a product's utility value is or even if the utility value is negative. Some researchers have considered this problem in multidimensional-scaling-based model or share-of-surplus choice rule. In...

One important objective of component-based software engineering is the minimization of the development cost of software products. Thus, the costs of software component implementation and verification, which may involve substantial expenses while under development, should be reduced. In addition, the costs for these processes should not be considere...

A novel multi-objective genetic algorithm (GA)-based rule-mining method for affective product design is proposed to discover a set of rules relating design attributes with customer evaluation based on survey data. The proposed method can generate approximate rules to consider the ambiguity of customer assessments. The generated rules can be used to...

The multinomial logit (MNL) consumer choice rules employed in the extant product design research assume that a product always has a market share even though the product has a very low utility value. In this paper, a new consumer choice rule integrating the dollar-scaled utility with piecewise logit function is proposed to avoid estimation bias caus...

In product design, various methodologies have been proposed for market segmentation, which group consumers with similar customer requirements into clusters. Central points on market segments are always used as ideal points of customer requirements for product design, which reflects particular competitive strategies to effectively reach all consumer...

In the semiconductor manufacturing industry, epoxy dispensing is a popular process commonly used in die-bonding as well as in microchip encapsulation for electronic packaging. Modeling the epoxy dispensing process is important because it enables us to understand the process behavior, as well as determine the optimum operating conditions of the proc...

When developing new products, it is important to understand customer perception towards consumer products. It is because the success of new products is heavily dependent on the associated customer satisfaction level. If customers are satisfied with a new product, the chance of the product being successful in marketplaces would be higher. Various ap...

The design of the late 1940’s automobile, the “Tucker 48”, is one of the most proclaimed cases of failure in the annals of American industry, after the World War II. With its Cyclops headlight which turned in tandem with the steering wheel, its rear-mounted engine, as well as its aerodynamic sheet metal, the Tucker 48 model, demonstrated to the pub...

As discussed in Chapter 1, it is important to determine the importance of customer requirements prior to product design since this could greatly affect the target value setting of engineering characteristics, which are related to the overall customer requirements of the product.

This chapter discusses the implementation of the enhanced fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), which is the improved version of the fuzzy AHP discussed in Chapter 3 for the determination of importance of customer requirements. Similar to the latter, the enhanced fuzzy AHP converts the linguistic assessment of customer requirements to triangular...

To develop a functional model which relates customer requirements to the design attributes of a new product, a set of customer survey data is usually used. As mentioned in Chapter 5, customer survey data is usually fuzzy in nature, as human feeling is usually fuzzy, and also nonlinearities are unavoidable in the relationships between customer requi...

In terms of new product development, marketing personnel are usually concerned with making the most of market opportunities by choosing the right price and understanding ‘consumer needs’, while engineering personnel may be concerned only with ascertaining whether the engineering requirements can be met satisfactorily. Product designers are concerne...

Chapter 9 introduced an innovative computational intelligence method based on simulated annealing, to perform optimization of new products. In this chapter, we introduce another computational intelligence method known as evolutionary algorithms to perform optimization of new products.

Chapter 1 mentioned that quality function deployment (QFD) is a commonly used method to support product planning. QFD utilizes four sets of matrices called Houses of Quality (HOQ) to relate customer requirements to product planning, parts deployment, process planning and manufacturing operations (Hauser and Clausing, 1988). In essence, QFD is a sys...

Chapters 3 and 4 discuss two AHP methods for determining the importance weights for customer requirements of products. When the functional relationship between each individual customer requirement and design attributes of a product is available, the product development teams can maximize the overall customer satisfaction with the new products by op...

Chapters 3 and 4 discussed using the fuzzy AHP approaches to determine the importance weights of customer requirements of new product designs. Chapters 5 to 8 discussed using fuzzy and evolutionary methods to generate models which represent relationships between customer requirements and the design attributes of new products. Based on the models an...

In this chapter, a new methodology for generating customer requirement models using the approach of neural fuzzy networks is discussed. Non-linear and explicit customer requirement models can be developed using this approach. Unlike standard neural network models, which are black-box in nature, explicit information can be extracted from neural fuzz...

In order to study a manufacturing process, it is common for engineers to conduct a large number of experiments and generate experimental data sets. Experimental data sets must first be processed and/or analyzed in order to extract patterns, useful information or knowledge. The development of effective and efficient methods for deriving knowledge fr...

It is well recognized that manufacturing concerns need to be considered in product design stage such that quality of manufactured products can be improved and their production cost can be reduced. To address these concerns, one common method is to develop manufacturing process models that relate the quality requirements of a new product to the vari...

Chapter 1 defines product design as the transformation of a market opportunity into a product available for sale made possible by product development technology. This transformation is a complex process, as it draws upon and contributes to different domains. Moreover, it is not well formalized. Computational intelligence algorithms fuse historical...

Family mould layout design (FMLD) is demanding and experience-dependent. It involves many sub-design tasks that determine the cost and performance of a family mould in the early conceptual mould layout design phase. This paper conducts a comprehensive literature review in the field of FMLD. The review ascertains that family mould cavity and runner...

In new product development, design teams commonly need to define engineering characteristics (ECs) in a quality function deployment (QFD) planning process. Prioritising the engineering characteristics in QFD is essential to properly plan resource allocation. However, the inherent vagueness or impreciseness in QFD presents a special challenge to the...

In this paper, a model that assists developers to evaluate and compare alternative reuse scenarios in software product line (SPL) development systematically in proposed. The model can identify basic activities (abstracted as operations) and precisely relate cost and reliability with each basic operation. A typical reuse mode is described from the p...

Affective product design aims at incorporating customers’ affective needs into design variables of a new product so as to optimise customers’ affective satisfaction. Faced with fierce competition in marketplaces, companies try to determine the settings in order to maximise customers’ affective satisfaction with products. To achieve this, a set of c...

Fuzzy regression is a commonly used approach for modeling manufacturing processes in which the availability of experimental data is limited. Fuzzy regression can address fuzzy nature of experimental data in which fuzziness is not avoidable while carrying experiments. However, fuzzy regression can only address linearity in manufacturing process syst...

Component based software development (CBSD) is well acknowledged as a methodology which establishes reusability of software and reduce development cost effectively. While developing enterprise application using component based software engineering (CBSE) methods, software component selection plays a very important role in the process of component r...

Due to the complex mapping relationship between product attributes and engineering characteristics, as well as the correlations between engineering characteristics and the engineering constraints on a product, a new product following a probabilistic rule of multidimensional scaling may not be in an optimal position in product engineering space. In...

Product family design and supplier selection are traditionally separated in two successive stages. First, product development teams determine optimal levels of the attributes of product components for each product variant of a product family, and purchasing departments then choose the qualified suppliers with the lowest cost. However, decoupling th...

To help the product development team select optimization solutions with multiple objectives interactively in the product family design process, a multi-objective optimization model for product family design was proposed, and multi-objective genetic algorithm was designed to solve the proposed model. Factors such as market segmentation, product util...