Evolving Engineering Design Trade-offs

In the engineering design process, it is important to know the engineering trade-offs achievable under various design preferences and strategies. In this paper, a family of engineering design trade-offs are evolved from an automatic design synthesis methodology based on evolutionary computation. The complete Pareto optima frontier can be evolved by a consideration of fitness function that aggregates the weighted fuzzy design preferences under different trade-off strategies. An initial case study concerned with the configuration of a collective sensory system is presented and discussed, along with preliminary results obtained from simulations under a specific scenario. The results indicate that the approach can be useful for designers to solve complex engineering problems.