A Hybrid Quality Loss Function-Based Multi-Objective Design Optimization Approach

摘要

In the globally competitive market, design engineers are continually challenged to improve product design, reduce costs, and increase customer satisfaction. It unsparingly compels them to strive hard to design high-quality products at competitive costs. The increasing challenge to satisfy multi-design criteria or goals at early design stages makes their task ever more complex. This article presents a modified multi-objective optimization approach that predominantly addresses quality loss issues while incorporating customer aspirations at the early design stages of the product development. The article classifies deviational variables as desirable and undesirable variables and advocates their use in defining the hybrid quality loss function (HQLF)-based objective function to seek tradeoffs among various quality characteristics together with quality loss issues. The proposed HQLF-based multi-objective optimization has been tested with a leaf spring example to demonstrate how the role of the desired as well as the undesired deviations can be sought to obtain an efficient solution. The HQLF-based objective function forces the model to minimize the undesirable deviation variables and maximize desirable deviation variables to track the efficient design points for control parameters. The benefit of the proposed approach has been demonstrated by comparing with existing goal programming methods.