Chemical processing industry has been expanding its focus from primarily business-to-business products (B2B) to business-to-consumer (B2C) products. The production of B2B products generally emphasizes on process design and optimization, whereas the production of B2C products focuses on product quality, ingredient selection, and product structure. Product pricing, costing, and competitive analysis must be considered as well. By far, these considerations have already been accounted for in the Grand Product Design Model, which consists of a process model, a property model, a quality model, a cost model, a pricing model, an economic model.^1,2 Despite the advances of the previous Grand Product Design Model, many issues have still not been fully understood and incorporated into. Thus,...[ Read more ]

Chemical processing industry has been expanding its focus from primarily business-to-business products (B2B) to business-to-consumer (B2C) products. The production of B2B products generally emphasizes on process design and optimization, whereas the production of B2C products focuses on product quality, ingredient selection, and product structure. Product pricing, costing, and competitive analysis must be considered as well. By far, these considerations have already been accounted for in the Grand Product Design Model, which consists of a process model, a property model, a quality model, a cost model, a pricing model, an economic model.^1,2 Despite the advances of the previous Grand Product Design Model, many issues have still not been fully understood and incorporated into. Thus, another evolvements and improvements are highly desired to further improve the previous Grand Product Design Model and thus promote the efficiency of new product development. In this thesis, the influences of the business and management issues (i.e., government policy, corporate social responsibility, supply chain, sustainability, and human senses) on product design and development are concerned.

Four extensions on the Grand Product Design Model have been explicitly made. In Chapter 2, the impact of government policy on company profit and corporate social responsibility is studied. The interactions of government-company-consumer are elaborated and a multi-objective optimization framework is proposed to account for these interactions. In Chapter 3, an integrative design procedure is developed where two important issues in supply chain (i.e., make-or-buy analysis and supplier selection) are explicitly incorporated into product design for generating more profitable products. In Chapter 4, product sustainability is concerned. A systematic framework is proposed for sustainable chemical product design where life cycle sustainability, rule-based methods, and general sustainable product design principles and knowledge are properly integrated. In Chapter 5, the Grand Product Design model is expanded as a generic approach to food product design where the influence of human senses on food quality is considered. A hybrid machine learning and mechanistic modeling approach, formulated as a grey-box optimization problem, is proposed to expedite new food product design. Finally, Chapter 6 summarizes the major contributions and the future work.