Lecture: Decision Model Development in Engineering Design
Professor Sundar Krishnamurty, of the UMass Department of Mechanical And Industrial Engineering will deliver this lecture as part of the Fall 2007 Operations Research / Management Science Seminar series. All are invited to attend.
Title: Decision Model Development in Engineering Design
Abstract: The study of engineering design as an iterative decision-making procedure in recent years has led to utilization of the concepts from decision analysis to solve engineering design problems. Decision analysis principles provide valuable insights in advancing the state of knowledge on rational design decisions in engineering design and enable a better understanding of their consequences from an overall design perspective. From a practical point of view, decision-based design offers a formal strategy to reduce the multiple attributes in an engineering design problem to a single overall utility function in a probabilistic sense, which reflects the designer’s intent and preferences under conditions of uncertainty.
In this talk, we will introduce a trade-off based robust design approach and highlight a fundamental dilemma to engineering modeling, which is that building a perfect model requires perfect information, or clairvoyance, while perfect information cannot be obtained in the absence of a perfect model. We will detail a preference-based modeling approach that can facilitate the trade-off between the quest for higher resolution models and the cost of gathering new information to refine model’s fidelity, from the standpoint of expected payoffs of anticipated design decisions. We will conclude with some highlights from our research on ontologies for supporting design optimization and from our recent assistive technology design innovations of the portable seatbelt and therapeutic deep-pressure vest.
More information about Prof. Sundar Krishnamurty.
This series is organized by the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter. Support for this series is provided by the Isenberg School of Management, the Department of Finance and Operations Management, and the John F. Smith Memorial Fund.
