Decision-based System Design

Catalog description

The course is designed for engineering students who are interested in furthering their knowledge in decision making methods during engineering design process. The Decision-Based Design (DBD) approach models design as a decision-making process with the aim of maximizing the performance of a designed artifact. The main question addressed in this course is: ‘what design alternative is the best considering both the performance of the design artifact and the consumer preferences?’ This course emphasizes the role of uncertainty in engineering design and reviews different approaches to decision-based design through discussing the strengths and weaknesses of each approach. Various topics including Robust Design, Suh’s Design Axioms, Multi-Attribute Utility Theory, Discrete Choice Analysis, Simulation-based Approaches, and Analytical Techniques for Modeling Consumer Preferences and Choices will be discussed in this course. Moreover, this course discusses the challenges that decision maker’s irrationalities and cognitive biases can bring into the design process.