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Currently-used decision support solutions allow decision makers to estimate the costof developing a new product, its production, and promotion, and compare the estimated cost tothe target cost. However, these solutions are inadequate for supporting simulations of identifyingconditions, by which the specific cost is reached. The proposed approach provides a frameworkfor searching for possible variants towards reaching the target production cost. This paper isconcerned with a prototyping problem of product development described in terms of a constraintsatisfaction problem. The proposed method uses parametric estimation to identify relationshipsbetween variables, and constraint programming to search for project completion variants within thecompany’s resources and project requirements. The results of an experiment indicate that constraintprogramming provides effective search strategies for finding admissible solutions. Consequently, theproposed approach allows decision makers to obtain alternative scenarios within the limits imposedby the production process. In this, it outperforms current methods dedicated to the support ofevaluating the total cost of a new product. The declarative approach presented in this paper is usedto model the production cost; however, it can be effortlessly extended to other aspects of productdevelopment (e.g., product reliability).
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