An Integrated Approach regarding Prioritizing Development Projects of New Defense Products

One of the challenges that research and development centers confront in the defense area is the prioritization of the development projects of a new product from among the diverse ideas, plans and demands of the armed forces and defense researchers with regard to resource restraints. In this respect, effective zones in the selection of the projects of developing a new defense product including defense, organizational and strategic, knowledge and technology, market and risk realms, as well as indicators related to each realm were extracted by conducting extensive library and field studies. With regard to the diversity and multiplicity of indicators, which lead to an increase in the error of prioritizing the projects, using the principal components analysis and data mining method in 21 research projects, the number of indicators were reduced from 42 identified indicators to 25 indicators. Also, a priority method, developed by the Fuzzy Topsis method, was proposed under the title of Fuzzy Topsis. In order to assess the efficiency of the suggested method, the prioritization of the five new product development projects was analyzed using hierarchical analysis, Fuzzy Topsis and structural Fuzzy Topsis, and the results of each of the three methods were compared with the opinions of the senior managers of the organization and it was observed that prioritization by the proposed method has the lowest difference with the senior manager's opinion. Also, in prioritizing 5 projects with the proposed method, the fifth project with a closeness coefficient of 0.4915 was selected as the first priority, the first project with a closeness coefficient of 0.3643 as the second priority, and finally the fourth project with a closeness coefficient of 0.3010 as the last priority.