Modeling of Computer-Based Decisions and Optimization in Design Process

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An important aspect of design is the balancing of conflicting objectives into a unified goal. Thus, the designer can be viewed as a decision maker charged with identifying alternatives that best match the overall design objectives. This research focuses on methods to represent design goals in an operational form, suitable for standard optimization formulations. The goal of the research is to contribute to the understanding of decision making in design and the formalization of this process in computations. The research will focus on three aspects of the formalization of the decision process: the construction of operational models for the aggregation of design objectives and the representation of preference structures; the incorporation of decision making models and optimization algorithms into a unique computational process; and the management of this information in a rule-based, computational environment. The methodology relies on fuzzy set representation of criteria for design evaluation and on the exploitation of sensitivity and constraint activity information to facilitate the communication between optimization and decision making. The implementation of these ideas in a computational environment will promote and organize the understanding of the process of decision making in design.