Customer-involved design concept evaluation (DCE) allows customers to take part in evaluating the design alternatives to get more popular design concept. Traditional customer-involved DCE methods still focus on the collection of customer responses and only consider cost and benefit characteristics of design criteria in multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) based evaluation process. Few studies have customized the decision-making algorithms specifically aimed at customers’ preferences. This paper further explores the customers’ influences in the early stages of the product design development, and proposes a new rough number based MCDM model (i.e., VIKOR) incorporating customers’ preferences for design specifications along with designers’ perceptions for the characteristics of design criteria (cost and benefit) to perform concept evaluation under subjective environment, and this proposed method is named as integrated rough VIKOR (IR-VIKOR). The objective of this study is to identify the best design concept which maximizes the satisfactions of expectations from most customers as well as conforms to the characteristics of design criteria. Firstly, Shannon entropy is used to obtain the weightings and relative importance ratings of design criteria from the customers’ preferences. Secondly, the customers’ preferences for design attribute values, the importance ratings of design criteria and the characteristics of design criteria are combined together to define the ideal solutions to calculate the rough evaluation index of each design alternative in IR-VIKOR, and finally the ranking result is provided by IR-VIKOR to determine the best design concept. A practical design example is introduced to illustrate the evaluation process of this proposed method, and the empirical comparisons are further carried out to validate its superiority for DCE. Through the sensitivity analysis experiments including i) inside IR-VIKOR, and ii) between IR-VIKOR and other classical MCDM methods, the proposed method is proved to be a reliable and feasible customer-involved DCE approach.

涉及客户的设计概念评估（DCE）使客户可以参与评估设计备选方案，从而获得更受欢迎的设计概念。传统的与客户有关的DCE方法仍然专注于收集客户响应，并且在基于多标准决策（MCDM）的评估过程中仅考虑设计标准的成本和收益特征。很少有研究针对客户的喜好定制决策算法。本文进一步探讨了客户在产品设计开发早期阶段的影响，并提出了一种新的基于粗数的MCDM模型（即 VIKOR）结合了客户对设计规范的偏好以及设计师对设计标准特征（成本和收益）的感知，以在主观环境下进行概念评估，该方法被称为集成粗糙VIKOR（IR-VIKOR）。这项研究的目的是确定最佳设计概念，该概念可以最大程度地满足大多数客户的期望，并符合设计标准的特征。首先，使用香农熵从客户的偏好中获得设计标准的权重和相对重要性等级。其次，客户对设计属性值的偏好，将设计准则的重要性等级和设计准则的特征结合在一起，定义理想的解决方案，以计算IR-VIKOR中每个设计方案的粗略评估指标，最后由IR-VIKOR提供排名结果以确定最佳方案设计理念。介绍了一个实际的设计实例来说明该方法的评估过程，并进行了经验比较以验证其对DCE的优越性。通过i）IR-VIKOR内部以及ii）IR-VIKOR与其他经典MCDM方法之间的灵敏度分析实验，该方法被证明是一种可靠且可行的，涉及客户的DCE方法。最后，排名结果由IR-VIKOR提供，以确定最佳设计概念。介绍了一个实际的设计实例来说明该方法的评估过程，并进行了经验比较以验证其对DCE的优越性。通过i）IR-VIKOR内部以及ii）IR-VIKOR与其他经典MCDM方法之间的灵敏度分析实验，该方法被证明是一种可靠且可行的，涉及客户的DCE方法。最后，排名结果由IR-VIKOR提供，以确定最佳设计概念。介绍了一个实际的设计实例来说明该方法的评估过程，并进行了实证比较以验证其对DCE的优越性。通过i）IR-VIKOR内部以及ii）IR-VIKOR与其他经典MCDM方法之间的灵敏度分析实验，该方法被证明是一种可靠且可行的，涉及客户的DCE方法。