A Product Evolution Rules Based Method for Retired Mechanical Product Demand Acquisition
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Dear Authors,
thank you very much for your work. Starting from your abstract I was keen on reading your whole article. On the first two pages I got lost because of some missunderstand of English expressions you used. Part of the text is written in fluent English, some parts seem to be written by less experienced writers (in english language): mabe you have a chance to re-read and re-write some of the text passages. I will give you some examples I stumbled accross later.
I was suprised when I suddenlay was confronted with pheromones after discussing product development. I am not familiar with ant-modelling. Maybe some introduction to ant theory and the vocabulary connected with ant-theory might be helpful.
Another aspect I stumbled accross was the sophisticated model on one hand and the example of the rollers on the other hand. I really like the example of the rollers, because you can comprehend the example by looking at the table with the different kind of rollers and their specification. I would love to see how you used that data in your ant-model.
on the other hand when reading your introduction about product developement I thought about mobile phones and the like, that is more complex objects than rollers. Maybe you can guide your reader's expectation more directly to the "simple" product of rollers because you can learn on that product, before you start to apply your model to more complex products.
Anyhow, I appreciate your work very much, especially to co-work of the different work groups.
here are some questions from the text:
line 46: what is ANP_QFD method?QFD Quality function deployment?
line 52: aggregation selection model: aggregation or selection? or aggregation of selections made before?
line 53: product market demand: market demand on the the product properties?
Line 56/57: Inventory management...: I did not understand yhat you meant to say.
line 72: RMP evolution...: Again problem in understanding on my side.
84: product capacity :or product properties?
109: product technical characteristics: technical characteristics of the product?
126: Introduce it into design.... ??
139: van Steenbergen and Mes predict (without s)
151-153 ... and their failure characteristics....scheme design: I got lost during reading.
164 product model features (?)
166 diffudion of newproduct features (?)
173 provides designers with product development directions: I think I understood what you meant...
175 patterns of each generation structure of the product???
203 Excavate its potential...RMPD : ??
Figure 2 Pj=[pi1]: it is a question concerning theused indices: if you have Pj, is it then pj instead of pi?
258: the generalized growth mode can (be) devide(d)... rules.
291elements in the data set to the data set (?)
372: Among them, rolling mill... consumption,...: please reconsider phrasing.
385: Because of the complex... performance,...: please reconsider phrasing.
475: comparison results: comparison of results (?)
Figure 5: where do the other graphs come from? how where they calculated? is Apriori your set of data?
Figure 6: Infuence of numbers of items and transactions on algorithm performance : where do those algorithms come from? where do the different number of items and transactions come from? Maybe I did not understand your text correctly, I appologize for that.
Author Response
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Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
The authors presented an article about “A product evolution rules-based method for retired mechanical product demand acquisition”. I think the paper is well organized and appropriate for sustainability journal, but the paper will be ready for publication after major revision.
Add more explanations for all tables and figures. They are inadequate.
There is an interesting approach and design exists, I just propose to emphasis the practical significance of the presented methodology in several points of article. The success of the study needs to be identified as numerical.
Please add key findings into the abstract.
Results and discussion and conclusion parts are inadequate according to citation and analyze in detail. There should be the importance of the study in detail, comparison results with other approaches in literature, the success of the prediction and computational results.
Improve the results and discussion and conclusion parts.
Please fix the typographical and eventual language problems in paper.
I believe that conclusions and future work is not enough.
The authors need to add discussion section.
There is a reference problem. First, your reference list contains a few papers from MDPI journal. If your work is convenient for this journal’s context then there are many references from these journals.
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
The authors presented an article «A product evolution rules based method for retired mechanical product demand acquisition». The authors are advised to consider the following comments for this paper.
· Abstract
The abstract need to be improved. Please provide the main quantitative and qualitative research core findings. Demonstrate in the abstract novelty, practical significance. Briefly list the input and output parameters of the research.
· Introduction
Seemingly, a comprehensive literature review was given. However, they were just summarized one- by-one. The authors have to stop after writing each example and think about the contributions and lack of knowledge for each paper. After that, in the final lines of the introduction give the blank spots of the topic. Then it will be clear what did authors make differently from the open literature. Some key references were studied in paper as follows: "doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7107358"
In the last paragraph of the introduction section; What is the scientific novelty of the paper? What is the practical value? What makes this approach different from other researchers? Please specify. Gap and significance of the work must be included.
· A flow chart should be added to the work. It will be a guide for readers.
· The advantages and disadvantages of the algorithms used should be discussed or given in table form.
· Do companies use retired machine parts? If so, what benefit would the following concluding sentence give them:
"It can be seen from the above information that the product demand of retired roll has certain flexibility, but it is also limited by the roll material, which is also in line with the actual work requirements of the roll. "
· 5. Case study
It is useful to add explanations of parameters to the results obtained. At least five sentences for each Figures. The results obtained should be explained by supporting the literature.
Figure 5a axis text should be corrected as "number of rules".
The yellow color in Figure 5 and 6 is not fully visible. It can be replaced with a different color.
The differences (Apriori/FP-growth and AP-ACO/BPS-ACO) in Figure 5 b should be discussed in more detail.
The differences (Apriori/FP-growth and AP-ACO/BPS-ACO) in Figure 6 a should be discussed in more detail.
Can the sentence "As the number of algorithm mining rules increases, the efficiency of the algorithm decreases" be supplemented with literature?
· 6. Conclusion and future work
The conclusions need to be improved. The results are written long. It is necessary to more clearly show the novelty of the article. Add qualitative and quantitative results of your work. What is the difference from previous work in this area? Show practical relevance. What are the differences from previous works?
Suggestions should be made to increase the studies to be done in this field in conclusion section.
· Authors should carefully study the comments and make improvements to the article step by step. All changes should be highlighted in color.
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
