Multiobjective Robust Design by Genetic Algorithms

One key feature of Japanese products is that their design quality is robust—it remains unaffected by the deleterious impact of environmental or other factors often beyond the user’s control. As a result, designing and producing such high-quality products have become the challenge for all manufacturers aspiring to be world-class in today’s marketplace. This article shows how expressly crafted genetic algorithms can uncover and then exploit the dependency among the key design factors (the choice of materials, parts, configurations, manufacturing methods, etc.) and the final product’s performance, to obtain ‘‘robust’’ performance. The methodology presented extends single objective design prototyping procedures called Taguchi methods to multiobjective robust design problems— problems for which no convenient methods presently exist.