Interactive Visualisation as a Powerful Decision Support Tool for Conceptual Design

Recent advances in evolutionary computation (EC) have made it possible for researchers to develop decision support tools that to some degree assist designers in decision making. Some of the difficulties with the EC are that they generate a population of alternative solutions to choose from and they are generated in a ‘black box’ mode, where there is little or no user interaction. The research presented in this paper is using an interactive visualisation tool that allows designers to conduct a human-led exploration of the solution space that has been generated by the EC. Multi-disciplinary design team members can interact independently with the system to explore and identify regions of the solution space which best meet their disciplinary objectives. The visualisation tools also allow them to find a common framework for multi-disciplinary design. This research then post-processes the data inside the region of the agreed framework, using a Pareto algorithm, to isolate non-dominated solutions for selection purposes.