Primarily, a technological forecast deals with the characteristics of technology, such as

levels of technical performance, like speed of a military aircraft, the power in watts of a
particular future engine, the accuracy or precision of a measuring instrument, the number
of transistors in a chip in the year 2015, etc. The forecast does not have to state how these
characteristics will be achieved.

Secondly, technological forecasting usually deals with only useful machines, procedures
or techniques. This is to exclude from the domain of technological forecasting those
commodities, services or techniques intended for luxury or amusement.

Commonly adopted methods of technology forecasting include the Delphi method,

forecast by analogy, growth curves and extrapolation. Normative methods of technology
forecasting — like the relevance trees, morphological models, and mission flow diagrams
— are also commonly used.

The Delphi method [pron: delfi] is a structured communication technique, originally

developed as a systematic, interactive forecasting method which relies on a panel of
experts.[1]

In the standard version, the experts answer questionnaires in two or more rounds. After
each round, a facilitator provides an anonymous summary of the experts’ forecasts from
the previous round as well as the reasons they provided for their judgments. Thus, experts
are encouraged to revise their earlier answers in light of the replies of other members of
their panel. It is believed that during this process the range of the answers will decrease
and the group will converge towards the "correct" answer. Finally, the process is stopped
after a pre-defined stop criterion (e.g. number of rounds, achievement of consensus,
stability of results) and the mean or median scores of the final rounds determine the
results.[2]

Other versions, such as the Policy Delphi,[3] have been designed for normative and
explorative use, particularly in the area of social policy and public health.[4] In Europe,
more recent web-based experiments have used the Delphi method as a communication
technique for interactive decision-making and e-democracy.[5]

Delphi is based on the principle that forecasts (or decisions) from a structured group of
individuals are more accurate than those from unstructured groups.[6] This has been
indicated with the term "collective intelligence".[7] The technique can also be adapted for
use in face-to-face meetings, and is then called mini-Delphi or Estimate-Talk-Estimate
(ETE). Delphi has been widely used for business forecasting and has certain advantages
over another structured forecasting approach, prediction markets.[8]

Morphology presents methods to change the shape of objects or the interrelationship between parts of
an object.
The morphological methods can be described in simple terms of adding or removing pixels according
to specific rules, which depends on the pattern of neighbour pixels.
Product life cycle (PLC)
Like human beings, products also have their own life-cycle. From birth to death human
beings pass through various stages e.g. birth, growth, maturity, decline and death. A
similar life-cycle is seen in the case of products. The product life cycle goes through
multiple phases, involves many professional disciplines, and requires many skills, tools
and processes. Product life cycle (PLC) has to do with the life of a product in the market
with respect to business/commercial costs and sales measures. To say that a product has a
life cycle is to assert four things:

 that products have a limited life,

 product sales pass through distinct stages, each posing different challenges,
opportunities, and problems to the seller,
 profits rise and fall at different stages of product life cycle, and
 products require different marketing, financial, manufacturing, purchasing, and
human resource strategies in each life cycle stage.

Request for deviation

In the process of building a product following defined procedure, an RFD is a request for
authorization, granted prior to the manufacture of an item, to depart from a particular
performance

[edit] Market identification

Termination is not always the end of the cycle; it can be the end of a micro-entrant within
the grander scope of a macro-environment. The auto industry, fast-food industry, petro-
chemical industry, are just a few that demonstrate a macro-environment that overall has
not terminated even while micro-entrants over time have come and gone.

The four main stages of a product's life cycle and the accompanying characteristics are:

Stage Characteristics
1. costs are very high
2. slow sales volumes to start
3. little or no competition
1. Market
4. demand has to be created
introduction stage
5. customers have to be prompted to try the product

6. makes no money at this stage

2. Growth stage 1. costs reduced due to economies of scale
2. sales volume increases significantly
3. profitability begins to rise
4. public awareness increases
5. competition begins to increase with a few new players in
 establishing market

6. increased competition leads to price decreases

1. costs are lowered as a result of production volumes
increasing and experience curve effects
2. sales volume peaks and market saturation is reached
3. increase in competitors entering the market
4. prices tend to drop due to the proliferation of competing
3. Maturity stage
products
5. brand differentiation and feature diversification is
emphasized to maintain or increase market share

6. Industrial profits go down

1. costs become counter-optimal
2. sales volume decline or stabilize
4. Saturation and 3. prices, profitability diminish
decline stage
4. profit becomes more a challenge of production/distribution
efficiency than increased sales

Systems engineering is an interdisciplinary field of engineering that focuses on how

complex engineering projects should be designed and managed over the life cycle of the
project. Issues such as logistics, the coordination of different teams, and automatic
control of machinery become more difficult when dealing with large, complex projects.
Systems engineering deals with work-processes and tools to handle such projects, and it
overlaps with both technical and human-centered disciplines such as control engineering,
industrial engineering, organizational studies, and project management.

Systems engineering focuses on analyzing and eliciting customer needs and required
functionality early in the development cycle, documenting requirements, then proceeding
with design synthesis and system validation while considering the complete problem, the
system lifecycle. Oliver et al. claim that the systems engineering process can be
decomposed into

 a Systems Engineering Technical Process, and

 a Systems Engineering Management Process.

Within Oliver's model, the goal of the Management Process is to organize the technical
effort in the lifecycle, while the Technical Process includes assessing available
information, defining effectiveness measures, to create a behavior model, create a
structure model, perform trade-off analysis, and create sequential build & test plan.

Life Cycle Engineering (LCE) is an approach to assess the environmental impacts in

conjunction with economic impacts under consideration of technical boundary
conditions. Scope of the assessment is usually the whole life cycle of a product consisting
of production, use phase and end of life. The environmental impacts are assessed
according to the ecological life cycle assessment (LCA). The economic impacts are
assessed according to the life cycle costing (LCC) approach. Technical boundary
conditions are taken into account providing some limitations on the model, thus verifying
the technical feasibility.

Shape optimization is part of the field of optimal control theory. The typical problem is
to find the shape which is optimal in that it minimizes a certain cost functional while
satisfying given constraints. In many cases, the functional being solved depends on the
solution of a given partial differential equation defined on the variable domain.

Topology optimization is, in addition, concerned with the number of connected

components/boundaries belonging to the domain. Such methods are needed since
typically shape optimization methods work in a subset of allowable shapes which have
fixed topological properties, such as having a fixed number of holes in them. Topological
optimization techniques can then help work around the limitations of pure shape
optimization.

value analysis

Definitions (2)
1. Manufacturing: Systematic analysis that identifies and selects best value alternatives for designs,
materials, processes, and systems. It proceeds by repeatedly asking "can the cost of this item or step be
reduced or eliminated, without diminishing the effectiveness, required quality, or customer
satisfaction?" Also called value engineering, its objectives are (1) to distinguish between the incurred
costs (actual use of resources) and the costs inherent (locked in) in a particular design (and which
determine the incurring costs), and (2) to minimize the locked-in costs.

2. Purchasing: Examination of each procurement item to ascertain its total cost of acquisition,
maintenance, and usage over its useful life and, wherever feasible, to replace it with a more
cost effective substitute. Also called value-in-use analysis.

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A statistical hypothesis test is a method of making decisions using data, whether from a
controlled experiment or an observational study (not controlled). In statistics, a result is
called statistically significant if it is unlikely to have occurred by chance alone. The
phrase "test of significance" was coined by Ronald Fisher: "Critical tests of this kind may
be called tests of significance, and when such tests are available we may discover
whether a second sample is or is not significantly different from the first."[1]
Hypothesis testing is sometimes called confirmatory data analysis, in contrast to
exploratory data analysis. In frequency probability, these decisions are almost always
made using null-hypothesis tests (i.e., tests that answer the question Assuming that the
null hypothesis is true, what is the probability of observing a value for the test statistic
that is at least as extreme as the value that was actually observed?)[2] One use of
hypothesis testing is deciding whether experimental results contain enough information to
cast doubt on conventional wisdom.

Statistical hypothesis testing is a key technique of frequentist statistical inference. The

Bayesian approach to hypothesis testing is to base rejection of the hypothesis on the
posterior probability.[3] Other approaches to reaching a decision based on data are
available via decision theory and optimal decisions.

The critical region of a hypothesis test is the set of all outcomes which, if they occur, will
lead us to decide that there is a difference. That is, cause the null hypothesis to be
rejected in favor of the alternative hypothesis. The critical region is usually denoted by C.

Example 1 - Court Room Trial

A statistical test procedure is comparable to a trial; a defendant is

considered not guilty as long as his guilt is not proven. The
prosecutor tries to prove the guilt of the defendant. Only when there
is enough charging evidence the defendant is convicted.

In the start of the procedure, there are two hypotheses H0: "the defendant is not guilty",
and H1: "the defendant is guilty". The first one is called null hypothesis, and is for the
time being accepted. The second one is called alternative (hypothesis). It is the
hypothesis one tries to prove.

The hypothesis of innocence is only rejected when an error is very unlikely, because one
doesn't want to convict an innocent defendant. Such an error is called error of the first
kind (i.e. the conviction of an innocent person), and the occurrence of this error is
controlled to be rare. As a consequence of this asymmetric behaviour, the error of the
second kind (acquitting a person who committed the crime), is often rather large.

Null Hypothesis (H0) is Alternative Hypothesis (H1) is

true true
He truly is not guilty He truly is guilty
Accept Null Hypothesis Wrong decision
Right decision
Aquittal Type II Error
Reject Null Hypothesis Wrong decision
Right decision
Conviction Type I Error