An Approach to Concept Evaluation of Mechanical Product under Incomplete Objective Information

Abstract

Due to subjective and incomplete design information collected at the early design stage, it is difficult to select the ‘best’ design concept from a number of alternatives. In this paper, a new decision making matrix based method is proposed to deal with the problem of concept evaluation with incomplete information on both objective weights and values. Firstly, the concept evaluation problem of mechanical product is considered as a multi-objective decision making problem with incomplete information. Then on the basis of the normalisation of decision making matrix, an optimisation model of quadratic programming is structured, in which the undetermined objective weights and values are regarded as unknown variables and the incomplete information on them are described with linear inequalities to form constraints. By solving this model, the unknown objective weights and values are obtained. Using these values, the evaluation value of each concept is calculated and the best concept is selected. This paper introd...