Conceptual Robustness in Simultaneous Engineering: A Formulation in Continuous Spaces

This paper develops a robust and distributed decision-making procedure for mathematically modelin 9 and computationally supporting simultaneous decision-making by members of an engineering team. The procedure (1) treats variations in the design posed by other members of the design team as conceptual noise; (2) incorporates such noise factors into conceptually robust decision-making; (3) provides preference information to other team members on the variables they control; and (4) determines whether to execute the conceptually robust decision or to wait for further design certainty. While Chang et al. (1994) extended Taguchi's approach to such simultaneous decision-making, this paper uses a continuous formulation and discusses the foundations of the procedure in greater detail. The method is demonstrated by a simple distributed design process for a DC motor, and the results are compared with those obtained for the same problem using sequential decision strategies in Krishnan et al. (1991).