Selected multi-criteria decision-making methods and their applications to product and system design

TL;DR

This paper reviews multi-criteria decision-making methods and their applications in engineering design, emphasizing the process of selecting optimal solutions from Pareto sets in multi-objective optimization problems.

Contribution

It provides an overview of selected MCDM methods used in engineering applications and discusses the importance of decision-making in choosing solutions from Pareto-optimal sets.

Findings

Various MCDM methods are applied in engineering design.

The paper highlights the importance of decision-making in multi-objective optimization.

It discusses the role of MCDM in selecting solutions from Pareto fronts.

Abstract

Optimization has found numerous applications in engineering, particularly since 1960s. Many optimization applications in engineering have more than one objective (or performance criterion). Such applications require multi-objective (or multi-criteria) optimization (MOO or MCO). Spurred by this and development of techniques for handling multiple objectives, MOO has found many applications in engineering in the last two decades. Optimization of an application for more than one objective gives a set of optimal solutions (known as non-dominated or Pareto-optimal solutions), which are equally good in the sense that no objective can be further improved without resulting in deterioration of at least one other objective. MOO in engineering has mainly focused on development of a model for the application, formulation of the MOO problem and solution of the formulated problem to find Pareto-optimal solutions. However, for completion of MOO, one more step is required to choose one of these optimal solutions for implementation.