Abstract
The effectiveness of current product design and manufacturing techniques is often reduced by the constriction of design spaces and the inclusion of various constraints based on the use of past examples, experience and intuition in the initial design stage. The expansion and transformation of design spaces that have been previously formulated and contracted is difficult. All too often, the original goal of creating the best possible design is replaced with a mechanical procedure to obtain an optimum solution based on a constrained design formulation. This paper proposes a methodology for breaking through current limitations by re-formulating previously formulated design spaces, using the conflicting preference information of each expert so that the satisfaction level of each decision-maker can be improved during collaborative optimization. A mechanical design example is offered to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
