2D decision-making for multicriteria design optimization

The high dimensionality encountered in engineering design optimization due to large numbers of performance criteria and specifications leads to cumbersome and sometimes unachievable trade-off analyses. To facilitate those analyses and enhance decision-making and design selection, we propose to decompose the original problem by considering only pairs of criteria at a time, thereby making trade-off evaluation the simplest possible. For the final design integration, we develop a novel coordination mechanism that guarantees that the selected design is also preferred for the original problem. The solution of an overall large-scale problem is therefore reduced to solving a family of bicriteria subproblems and allows designers to effectively use decision-making in merely two dimensions for multicriteria design optimization.