An Approach to Feasibility Assessment In Preliminary Design

In this paper, we present the development and application of a Technical Feasibility Model (TFM) used in preliminary design to determine: whether or not a set of desired product specifications is technically feasible, and the optimality of those specifications with respect to the Pareto frontier. The TFM is developed by integrating the capabilities of a multidisciplinary design framework, a multi-objective design optimization tool, a Pareto set gap analyzer, metamodeling methods, and mathematical methods for feasibility assessment. This tool is then applied to a three objective example problem and to a five objective passenger vehicle design problem by analyzing benchmarking data from 78 late model sedans.