NEUROCOMPUTING 2014 - Special Issue on Computational Intelligence Techniques for New Product Development

CALL FOR PAPERS ? NEUROCOMPUTING
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I. Special issue title: Computational Intelligence Techniques for New Product Development
II. Aim and Scope:
Global competition and the development of novel manufacturing technologies have dramatically changed the operating environment of the industry. Vigorous challenges have transformed many manufacturers from production-centralized to customer-driven ones. Therefore, new product development (NPD) is essential to understand and analyze the customers’ behaviour in buying new products, in order to generate a new product which satisfies customer needs. NPD is a complex process involving a series of activities, in different stages, from understanding the market needs to developing a new product for satisfying various technical and product lifecycle requirements. In order to successfully deliver profitable new products to the market, there are a number of challenging issues in each activity. Computational techniques could help enterprises to address such challenging issues in the NPD processes.
In the last two decades, a wide range of computational intelligence techniques, including evolutionary computation, fuzzy systems, artificial neural networks, swarm intelligence, decision analysis techniques, have been employed for new product development. Applying computational intelligence techniques for new product design is a fast-growing and promising research area in computer science and industrial engineering, which can help improve the effectiveness of the process.
Although quite a number of new product development oriented research with computational intelligence were conducted in the past few decades, there are a number of critical issues which are related to the development of effective computational intelligence with respect to the rapidly growing customer needs, dynamic markets, and increasing importance of predicting customer values and satisfaction in developing new products.
This special issue aims to bring together academia and industry experts to report on the latest progress in the development of computational intelligence techniques for solving specific problems in new product design and to explore new areas in this application.
III. Target Audience:
Research students, researchers and scientists from academia with interests in computational intelligence and who are involved in the development effective intelligent methods and solving hard and complex problems related to new product design.
Engineers and researchers from manufacturing industries who are involved in the development of new products.
IV. Topics covered
We are inviting people from academia and industry to submit papers regarding computational intelligence techniques for new product design. Relevant areas include (but are not limited to) the followings:
? Development of computational intelligence techniques:
o Evolutionary algorithms
o Particle swarm intelligence algorithms
o Fuzzy logic methods
o Fuzzy decision making methods
o Neuro-fuzzy methods
o Neural networks, etc.
? Issues on new product development:
o Market and competition Analyses
o Idea Generation
o Idea Screening
o Market segmentation and targeting
o Product positioning
o Concept Development and Testing
o Market Testing
o Defining design/product specifications
o Technical Implementation
o New product forecasting and pricing
o New product realization
V. Important Dates:
Paper submission: 1 November 2013
Notification of Acceptance: 15 March 2014
Final Submission: 15 August 2014
VI. Submission Guidelines
All manuscripts and any supplementary material should be submitted through Elsevier Editorial System (EES). The authors must select as “SI: Comp Intel Tech New Prod” when they reach the “Article Type” step in the submission process. The EES website is located at: http://ees.elsevier.com/neucom/
VII. Guest Editors
Dr. Kit Yan Chan
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering,
Curtin University,
Australia
Email: kit.chan-AT-curtin.edu.au
Dr. Kevin Kam Fung Yuen
Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering,
Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University,
China
Email: Kevin.Yuen-AT-xjtlu.edu.cn
Dr. Vasile Palade
Department of Computer Science,
University of Oxford,
United Kingdom
Email: vasile.palade-AT-cs.ox.ac.uk
Associate Prof. C.K. Kwong
Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering,
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University,
Hong Kong
Email: c.k.kwong-AT-polyu.edu.hk