Selecting the best product concept is one of critical tasks in product development process.
Making decisions at this stage becomes very difficult due to imprecise and uncertain product
requirements. This paper presents the framework of product concept selection that integrates the
fuzzy set theory and the analytic hierarchy process (AHP). In the proposed approach, the fuzzy
membership function is employed in performing "pairwise comparison" between competing
alternatives and a "reference" on each of the criteria. The use of a reference is due to the difficulty
in consistently comparing concepts to one another. The comparisons are also used to obtain the
relative importance of criteria with respect to the overall objective. Once pairwise comparisons are
completed, vector aggregates are computed through the use of an original AHP method and fuzzy
arithmetic operations. A numerical example is presented to illustrate the approach.