Limitations of Pareto Front in Design Under Uncertainty and Their Reconciliation

作者:Pandey Vijitashwa; Mourelatos Zissimos P*; Nikolaidis Efstratios
来源:Journal of Mechanical Design, 2013, 135(7): 071010.
DOI:10.1115/1.4024224

摘要

Engineering design reconciles design constraints with decision maker (DM) preferences. The task of eliciting and encoding decision maker preferences is, however, extremely difficult. A Pareto front representing the locus of the nondominated designs is, therefore, often generated to help a decision maker select the best design. In this paper, we show that this method has a shortcoming when there is uncertainty in both the decision problem variables and in the model of decision maker%26apos;s preferences. In this case, the Pareto front is inconsistent with multi-attribute utility (MAU) theory, unless the decision maker trades off attributes or some functions of them linearly. This is a strong restriction. To account for this, we propose a methodology that enables a decision maker to select the best design on a modified pareto front (MPF) which is acquired using envelopes of a set of certainty equivalent (CE) surfaces. The proposed method does not require separability of the multi-attribute utility function into single-attribute utilities, nor does it require the decision maker to trade the attributes (or any function of them) linearly. We demonstrate our approach on a simple optimization problem and in design of a reduction gear.

  • 出版日期2013-7