ABSTRACT
The general consensus in the engineering design community is that the main motivation for an engineering firm’s activities is to make money. There is nothing necessarily unethical about this notion, though. As Hermann and Schmidt (2006) argue, profit-making enterprises generate employment, manufacture products, and serve the community in the process. Arguably, the contribution to society is greater than the burden, since we do buy their products, which enrich our lives. This decision to purchase also allows the customers to decide the fate of a product, and eventually the company. Of course, the inverse problem of how to make a product that the customers will buy is central to the decision making in a profitmaking company. Indeed, there are engineering challenges and regulatory hurdles in making working products; the final sales determine profitability and are the driving factors that make a product successful. To that effect, demand modeling, the study of the expected number of sales of a product, is undertaken.
