Trade-off Analytics for Set-Based Design

摘要

Set-Based Design (SBD) has been developed as an alternative to Point-Based Design (PBD). SBD has been successfully used by Toyota in the automotive industry and currently has significant interest in the Department of the Navy, Department of Defense (DoD) organizations, and several researchers. SBD develops sets of design solutions that span the design space, evaluates the design sets, delays design decisions to eliminate sets until adequate information is available, and documents the rationale for eliminating sets. The paper provides a focused literature review of published SBD research, and then focuses on developing trade-off analytics to support SBD decision-making to define value, evaluate sets, incorporate new information, and eliminate sets. The proposed approach is to align SBD terms with common systems engineering terms; identify the necessary and sufficient conditions for SBD evaluation; develop a broad mathematical formulation for SBD evaluation; and illustrate how trade-off analytics can support SBD decision-making. The paper concludes that trade-off analytics provides a consistent and credible tool to implement SBD.