ABSTRACT
Manufacturing industries have been directing their efforts to decrease the cost of their products [1]. This has become necessary because of the rapidly increasing demands, insistence on higher quality, better performance, and on-time delivery, in addition to reasonable cost. These parameters are very important in order to thrive and sustain in a highly competitive global market. According to Nasr and Kamrani [2], the quality of the product design (i.e., how well the product has been designed) has been one of the crucial factors in establishing the commercial success as well as a societal value of the product. Therefore, the product design can be considered as one of the most significant operations in the design life cycle. Moreover, it is worth mentioning here that a substantial fraction of the total cost of any product depends on its design procedures or techniques [3]. The importance of design in manufacturing can further be emphasized by the fact that approximately 70% of the manufacturing costs of the product
depend on the design decisions while production decisions only contribute to about 20% [4] (Figure 1.1).
