Decision-Making in Engineering Design

Engineering design needs to employ the necessary multidisciplinary skills and tools to generate the alternative designs and identify the optimal one. To perform the most successful design optimization, the needs and priorities of all stakeholders involved with the engineering design should be considered. Towards this goal, a standardized process is presented, implementing the Value Driven Design (VDD) philosophy and allowing to perform a multi-objective and multi-stakeholder engineering design optimization. The needs of all major stakeholders involved with the designed system are captured with Game Theory, forming a hybrid cooperative/non-cooperative, non-zero sum, complete information game. In this hybrid game, the classical cooperative games are combined with the non-cooperative game of Game Theory to identify the optimal engineering design that has the property of being the Nash bargaining solution (NBS) simultaneously, capturing both the conflict and the synergy between the stakeholders. Thus, engineering design is converted to a formalized decision-making process, taking into account all the objectives of the stakeholders involved with the designed system.