Understanding customer preferences in consideration decisions is critical to choice modeling in engineering design. While existing literature has shown that the exogenous effects (e.g., product and customer attributes) are deciding factors in customers’ consideration decisions, it is not clear how the endogenous effects (e.g., the intercompetition among products) would influence such decisions. This paper presents a network‐based approach based on Exponential Random Graph Models to study customers’ consideration behaviors according to engineering design. Our proposed approach is capable of modeling the endogenous effects among products through various network structures (e.g., stars and triangles) besides the exogenous effects and predicting whether two products would be conisdered together. To assess the proposed model, we compare it against the dyadic network model that only considers exogenous effects. Using buyer survey data from the China automarket in 2013 and 2014, we evaluate the goodness of fit and the predictive power of the two models. The results show that our model has a better fit and predictive accuracy than the dyadic network model. This underscores the importance of the endogenous effects on customers’ consideration decisions. The insights gained from this research help explain how endogenous effects interact with exogeous effects in affecting customers’ decision‐making.

The aero-engine is the heart of an aircraft; its performance deteriorates rapidly due to the high temperature and high-pressure environment during flights. It is necessary to predict the remaining useful life (RUL) to improve the reliability of aero-engines and provide security for reliable flights. In previous flights, the sensors collected a lot of performance parameter data and formed a database regarding the aero-engine degradation process. These performance parameters cannot reflect the degradation process directly. In this paper, fuzzy clustering is applied to divide the degradation stages of the aero-engine, construct the health indicator, and describe the degradation process. Time-series decomposition modeling is applied to predict the degradation process of the health indicator. Based on the idea of similarity comparison, the RUL is predicted by comparing the similarity of time series through example learning. The method is verified and analyzed on the dataset published by National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and the mean square error (MSE) is 528. The result is better than the comparative method.

Remaining useful life (RUL) prediction is the main approach to guarantee the reliability of lithium-ion batteries. This paper proposes an interpretable hybrid method to predict the RUL distribution with changeable form. The method integrates prior knowledge from the statistical model and regular patterns learned from monitoring data based on the data-driven model. The predicted compound distribution provides more information compared to point estimation and distribution with fixed form. The general hybrid framework contains a component learner, a fusion model with a stacking strategy, and a prognostic distribution algorithm with adaptive sampling weights. The stacking fusion model is implemented by a one-dimensional convolution neural network. The sampling weights are estimated by optimal estimation. The statistical model describes the individual capacity degradation path based on the Wiener process. The data-driven model learns the degradation process from historical data based on convolutional gated recurrent neural network (CNN-GRU) and Monte Carlo dropout simulation. The comparative experiments between the proposed method and existing methods were carried out. The experiment results show that the proposed hybrid method performs well.