Dealing With Uncertainty in Design and Configuration Problems

Design is an activity that translate a set of requirements in a feasible product by considering constraints coming from physics, technology avaibility and designer preferences. Configuration is a special case of design in which the product component properties are already predefined. In this paper, the design of a new concepts (or the validation of existing ones) is considered as a configuration problem. In the first part of this paper, we present a generic approach for conceptual design, the earliest phase of design, combining the constraint satisfaction formalism and the object-oriented framework. In the second part, we introduce an approach to deal with uncertainties mostly found during the conceptual design phase. The proposed approach is very easy to implement and guarantees the upper bound of the solution existence probability. The designer can now make his or her decisions not only based on the product performance, but also on the risk associated to that performance.