A case retrieval method combined with similarity measurement and multi-criteria decision making for concurrent design

In current practice, the design is still based on the sequential design methodology, which makes the process or manufacture information not considered at the preliminary design stage. In addition, the quality of design and the time to perform them are largely dependent on the experience of the engineers. Casebased design is an intelligent method which involves retrieving the most similar previous cases to provide a solution of a new decision problem. Therefore, case retrieval is the most crucial process in casebased design. However, few studies attempt to research case retrieval in concurrent design. This paper proposes a hybridization of fuzzy similarity measurement (FSM) and fuzzy multi-criteria decision making (FMCDM) for case retrieval from historical cases for concurrent design. In FSM stage, triangular function is used to represent the different fuzzy requirements, respectively, and meanwhile calculate the similarity. Less valuable case is filtered out by defined threshold. Then FMCDM is developed to evaluate the most similar cases in terms of product criteria to pick out the most suitable case. Furthermore, the FSM– FMCDM model is applied to power transformer concurrent design, and the experiment indicates that the FSM–FMCDM retrieval is more reasonable than the prior SM only case retrieval. 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.