Usage context-based choice modeling for hybrid electric vehicles

Usage Context-Based Design (UCBD) has become an area of growing interest in engineering design research, due to the increasingly important role that usage context plays in customers' choices. In this paper, a usage context-based choice modeling framework (UCBCM) is presented to bridge the gap between engineering product design and customers' choice of new products by using hybrid electric vehicles (HEV) as an example. Uniquely, Different from existing choice modeling works, the product performances are explicitly modeled as a function of product design variables, customer profile, and usage context to reflect the heterogeneity in customer preference and usage context. Furthermore, the multinomial logic choice model is integrated with the ordered logit model to study the impact of vehicle design on consumer's choice. The case study of HEV illustrates the usefulness of the UCBCM framework and demonstrates the importance of modeling usage context using both revealed preference data and consumer rating data.