Achieving Pareto Optimality in a Decentralized Design Environment
Year: 2009
Editor: Norell Bergendahl, M.; Grimheden, M.; Leifer, L.; Skogstad, P.; Lindemann, U.
Author: Honda, Tomonori; Ciucci, Francesco; Yang, Maria C.
Series: ICED
Section: Design Methods and Tools
Page(s): 501-
Abstract
As engineering systems grow in complexity, the teams that design them require increasingly disparate expertise and must operate in a more distributed fashion. At the same time, subsystem design teams need to compete and compromise with each other for a limited set of resources. Thus, it becomes crucial to establish a systems-level understanding of the trade-offs between subsystems. However, there is little research into formal design methods for determining rational designs in a decentralized environment. Lewis and others have developed an effective Game Theoretic approach based on Decision Theory to locate a Nash Equilibrium design with minimum information sharing. This paper presents a design technique that minimizes information sharing between subsystems and simultaneously converges to a set of Pareto Optimal designs. In this paper, designers were permitted to share a quadratic approximation of each subsystems objective function at each iteration. This research is illustrated by examples using a Pressure Vessel and an Airplane Design which demonstrate that Pareto Optimal Designs can be obtained in a decentralized design environment.
Keywords: decentralized design, distributed design, Pareto Optimality, system design