A Safety Evaluation Method for a Product Design Planning Stage: Application of AHP and Fuzzy
박지영, 조암 · Journal of the Ergonomics Society of Korea · 2008
As users increasingly recognize the importance of safety and the Product Liability comes into effect, a company should take responsibility of protecting the users who use its product. In order to produce a safe product and satisfy the needs of users, it is critical for developers to evaluate the safety of the product appropriately and understand the characteristics of the product accurately. Furthermore, a safe product can be realized by considering a safety level of the product in a whole product development process. However, in general, product development projects hardly evaluate the safety of a product in the product planning step. In addition, most of safety evaluation methods which are applied in the product planning step have a tendency to be qualitative because a detailed product design can not be specified in this step. Therefore, this research aims at enhancing the performance of the safety evaluation process by applying quantitative methods such as 'AHP' and 'Fuzzy'. AHP can help analysts derive the weight of safety factors. Fuzzy is applied to evaluate the degree of safety of product elements in this paper. The proposed method will be able to improve the safety level of a product by using the quantitative methods in the product planning step.