Abstract
Design optimization has largely remained an engineering endeavor. Yet many product decisions aremade based on business criteria derived from economic, investment, and marketing considerations. These decisions are presented to the engineers who must then optimize the design within the given criteria and constraints. We propose the hypothesis that in a significant number of situations engineering optimization can be integrated with the social and business environment where decisions are made and thus reach substantially better decisions for the designing enterprise and society. Since the foundation of this work is decision models, a key challenge remains the construction of models of proper fidelity for the integrated enterprise-wide decisions. Engineers who are willing to invest in such modeling knowledge are likely to have strong positive impact on the technological decisions made by enterprises and society.
