An integrated AHP and VIKOR for design concept evaluation based on rough number

•An integrated rough number based method is presented to evaluate design concepts under subjective environment.•Rough number is introduced to deal with the vagueness in decision-making.•A novel AHP based on rough number is presented to determine the weight of each evaluation criterion.•A rough number based VIKOR is proposed to evaluate the design concept alternatives.•The proposed method can effectively enhance the objectivity in design concept evaluation. Design concept evaluation at the early stage of product design has been widely recognized as one of the most critical phases in new product development as it determines the direction of the downstream design activities. However, the information at this stage is mainly subjective and imprecise which only depends on experts’ judgments. How to handle the vagueness and subjectivity in design concept evaluation becomes a critical issue. This paper presents a systematic evaluation method by integrating rough number based analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and rough number based compromise ranking method (also known as VIKOR) to evaluate design concepts under subjective environment. In this study, rough number is introduced to aggregate individual judgments and preferences and deal with the vagueness in decision-making. A novel AHP based on rough number is presented to determine the weight of each evaluation criterion. Then an improved rough number based VIKOR is proposed to evaluate the design concept alternatives. Sensitivity analysis is conducted to measure the impact of the decision makers’ risk to the final evaluation results. Finally, a practical example is put forward to validate the performance of the proposed method. The result shows that the proposed decision-making method can effectively enhance the objectivity in design concept evaluation under subjective environment.