A Qualitative Approach to Set Achievable Goals During the Design Phase of Complex Systems

Abstract

The problem addressed in this paper is "how to set ambitious targets when improving or designing a product while these targets remain within the reach of the manufacturer". Thus, improvements to be focused on are those which both have a significant positive impact on product performance and correspond to operational changes properly under control by the manufacturer. While some approaches in the literature have already addressed each of the two issues of the improvement problem, few deal with both of them at the same time. In this paper we investigate a qualitative approach that conciliates both points of view as an optimization problem. The notion of interaction between any two objectives to be simultaneously satisfied is central in our framework. An illustrative example related to the design phase of autonomous robot is provided.