Relative Importance of Criteria in Configuration Design of Vehicles

Configuration design of mechanical systems corresponds to finding the placement of a set of components such that performance criteria are optimized while satisfying design constraints. In this paper, the configuration design of a midsize truck for optimum vehicle dynamic behavior, survivability, and maintainability is considered within a multi-criteria decision making framework in which decision maker’s preferences are included a posteriori. A set of Pareto solutions is first generated with a multi-objective genetic algorithm, and the Pareto solutions are screened according to a new preference model based on allowable tradeoffs modeled as polyhedral cones or matrices. The model extracts preferred designs from the Pareto set producing a short list of “strong” or “privileged” designs, which is a useful feature when preferences are unknown.