IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/inm/ormnsc/v42y1996i8p1105-1117.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Genetic Algorithms for Product Design

Author

Listed:
  • P. V. (Sundar) Balakrishnan

    (Business Administration Program, University of Washington, Bothell, Washington 98021)

  • Varghese S. Jacob

    (Department of Accounting and MIS, Max M. Fisher College of Business, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio 43210)

Abstract

Product design is increasingly recognized as a critical activity that has a significant impact on the performance of firms. Consequently, when firms undertake a new (existing) product design (redesign) activity, it is important to employ techniques that will generate optimal solutions. As optimal product design using conjoint analysis data is an NP-hard problem, heuristic techniques for its solution have been proposed. This research proposes the use of and evaluates the performance of Genetic Algorithms (GA), which is based on the principles of natural selection, as an alternative procedure for generating "good" (i.e., close to optimal) solutions for the product design problem. The paper focuses on (1) how GA can be applied to the product design problems, (2) determining the comparative performance of GA vis-à-vis the dynamic programming (DP) heuristic (Kohli and Krishnamurti [Kohli, R., R. Krishnamurti. 1987. A heuristic approach to product design. Management Sci. 33(12) 1523--1533.], [Kohli, R., R. Krishnamurti. 1989. Optimal product design using conjoint analysis: Computational complexity and algorithms. Eur. J. Oper. Res. 40 186--195.]) in generating solutions to the product design problems, (3) the sensitivity of the GA solutions to variations in parameter choices, and (4) generalizing the results of the dynamic programming heuristic to product designs involving attributes with varying number of levels and studying the impact of alternate attribute sequencing rules.

Suggested Citation

  • P. V. (Sundar) Balakrishnan & Varghese S. Jacob, 1996. "Genetic Algorithms for Product Design," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 42(8), pages 1105-1117, August.
    • Handle: RePEc:inm:ormnsc:v:42:y:1996:i:8:p:1105-1117
    DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.42.8.1105
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.42.8.1105
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1287/mnsc.42.8.1105?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:inm:ormnsc:v:42:y:1996:i:8:p:1105-1117. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Asher (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/inforea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.