This paper proposes a top-down approach for product concept selection. The proposed approach integrates an analytical approach to define an acceptable part specification range (part range), and an optimization approach to find optimum tolerances of part specifications. In the analytical part of the procedure, an inverse of design matrix is used to identify a part range. In the optimization part of the procedure, a product cost is defined as a function of part specification tolerances, and optimization algorithm is used to find optimum part specification tolerances that minimize the cost of the concept. The concept with the minimum cost is selected as the optimum concept. The usefulness of the proposed approach is demonstrated using an illustrative example.

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