Usage Coverage Model for choice modeling: Principles

Accurately capturing the future demand for a given product is a hard task in today's new product development initiatives. As customers become more market-savvy and markets continue fragment, current demand models could greatly benefit from exploiting the rich contextual information that exists in customers' product usage. As such, we propose a Usage Coverage Model (UCM) as a more thorough means to quantify and capture customer demand by utilizing factors of usage context in order to inform an integrated engineering design and choice modeling approach. We start by presenting the principles of the UCM model: terms, definitions, variable classes and relation classes so as to obtain a common usage language. The usage model exhibits the ability to differentiate between individuals' product performance experiences. With Discrete Choice Analysis, individuals' performance with a given product is compared against that of competitive products, capturing individual customers' choice behavior and thereby creating an effective model of product demand. As a demonstration of our methods, we apply our model in a case study regarding the general task of cutting a wood board with a jigsaw tool. We conclude by presenting the scope of future work for the case study and the contribution of the entire current and future work to the field as a whole.