Abstract
The machining center is currently positioned as one of the core facilities in a wide range of production systems. With its increasing importance in the manufacturing environment it has become a consequential requirement for producers of machining centers to improve their market competitiveness. This implies a need for establishing a new methodology for market competitiveness analysis based specifically on the conversion of uncertain market requirements into the technological attributes rather than on statistical data. This paper proposes a methodology for systematically and rationally analyzing the market competitiveness of a machining center using multidimensional vectors:in order to quantify the competitiveness factors, user needs and performance specification of the machining center are represented by the vectors in multidimensional coordinates. The validity of the proposed method has been verified through case studies.
