Robust Product Concept Generation

It is accustomed to call robust design a design that is resilient to noise. A product could be designed to be robust by methods such as Taguchi's (1987). The idea is to manipulate the design parameters that could be controlled by designers to minimize the effect of the noise on the planned behavior in the designated environment. We are concerned with a broader perspective of robustness, one that arises from many environmental uncertainties including those related to technical knowledge, customers, and market conditions. In such interpretations, the product behavior includes physical behavior as well as customer satisfaction, cost, as well as any parameter that is related to the technical and market success of the product. In this context, we define a product as robust if a large variety of potential environmental uncertainties have little impact on its behavior.