The process planning of a product represents in the manufacturing industry a major element that determines the level of economic performance of the company. The development and evaluation of process planning during the industrialization phase of a product can cause problems of quality, cost or manufacturing time. Therefore, process planning needs to be evaluated early, during the design phase. The aim of this article is to propose to a manufacturing company a hybrid approach of multicriterion decision support, allowing evaluating the concepts proposed by the designer to choose the best concept having the best industrial performance indicators, and to take into account the opinions of experts from different departments of the company. The multicriterion choice is made by the hybridization of the ROC method and the PROMETHEE method, and the decision criteria are indicators that express the performance of a process planning. Then, to illustrate the capacity of the model, a case study of a product is presented.

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Maximum lifetime and minimum manufacturing cost for new products are the primary goals of companies for competitiveness. These two objectives are contradictory and the geometric dimensions of the products directly control them. In addition, the earlier design errors of new products are predicted, the easier and more inexpensive their rectification becomes. To achieve these objectives, we propose in this article a novel model that makes it possible to solve the problem of optimizing the lifespan and the manufacturing cost of new products during the phase of their design. The prediction of the life of the products is carried out by an energy damage method implemented on the Finite Element (FE) calculation by using the ABAQUS software. The manufacturing cost prediction is carried out by applying the ABC cost estimation analytical method. In addition, the optimization problem is solved by the method of genetic algorithms. The proposed model can be successfully applied for the optimization of new mechanical products made by subtractive manufacturing. The products which mostly benefits from this model are those used in machines and in the automotive or aeronautic fields. The proposed approach can be directly used by the designer for an optimal preliminary design of new products whose manufacture is done by the same company or subcontracted entirely or partially by other companies.