U.S. - Germany Cooperative Research on Fuzzy Engineering Design Methods

该奖项支持加州理工学院的Erik Antonsson教授、麻省理工学院的Kevin Otto助理教授以及Antonsson教授的两名研究生与德国莱辛-西法利斯工业大学（RWTH-Aachen）运营研究部的Hans-Juergen Zimmerman教授和Hans-Juergen Sebastian教授在制造工程基础研究方面的合作。两个小组都在利用“模糊集”的新数学来表示本质上不精确的信息，并形式化冲突目标之间的权衡。美国参与者将受益于将他们在工程设计研究中应用模糊集理论的专业知识与德国在构型设计中表示和操纵不精确的经验相结合。在探索了这些方法的共性之后，他们希望将它们整合起来，并将组合方法应用于一个现实的工业问题，以测试该技术的鲁棒性。用模糊集理论代替效用理论是处理不确定条件下决策问题的一种有前景的新方法。配置和工程设计的统一形式化方法可以应用于几乎所有的工程设计问题，并且应该减少工程设计时间和提高设计质量，特别是在大型复杂系统的设计中。在工程设计中增加并发性（通常按顺序完成的工作重叠）有可能显著减少创建成功设计所需的时间。

This award supports Professor Erik Antonsson of California Institute of Technology, Assistant Professor Kevin Otto of MIT and two graduate students of Professor Antonsson's to collaborate in fundamental research in manufacturing engineering with Professors Hans-Juergen Zimmerman and Hans-Juergen Sebastian of the Department of Operations Research of the Rheinisch-Westfaelische Technische Hochschule Aachen (RWTH-Aachen.) Both groups are utilizing the new mathematics of `fuzzy sets` to represent intrinsically imprecise information and to formalize trade-offs between conflicting goals. The US participants will benefit from joining their expertise in applying fuzzy set theory in Engineering Design research with the German experience in representing and manipulating imprecision in Configuration Design. After exploring the commonalities in their approaches, they expect to integrate them and apply the combined approach to a realistic industrial problem to test the robustness of the technique. The use of fuzzy set theory instead of utility theory is a promising new approach to dealing with decision-making under uncertainty. A unified formal method for configuration and engineering design could be applied to virtually all engineering design problems, and ought to reduce engineering design time and increase design quality, particularly in the design of large, complex systems. Increasing concurrency (the overlap of work normally done sequentially) in engineering design has the potential to significantly decrease the time required to create a successful design.