Application of fuzzy-logic for design assessment of complex engineering systems in the early design stages

Abstract

Performance characteristics of production-logistic systems arestrongly dependent on their initial design. Hence, it is crucial to employ proper performance assessment approaches at their early design stages. Existing approaches mostly use optimisation for quantitative performance assessment. However, qualitative aspects of such systems considerably impact their lifetime performance. Uncertainty is significant in assessing the qualitative performance of a system. Fuzzy-logic is a useful approach in addressing uncertainty. This paper investigates the application of fuzzy-logic for design assessment of such systems against qualitative criteria. The proposed approach can be utilised as a decision-supporting framework at early design stages of such systems. The framework allows design assessment by modelling the subjective opinion of domain experts. The framework has a hybrid-hierarchical structure, embodying the complex structure of a system to fuzzy-models in a hierarchical manner and allocates related knowledge to fuzzy-models in different hierarchy levels. The framework is applied to a real case to demonstrate its application.