Implicit Preferences in Engineering Design: Extraction of Probabilistic Preferences from Early Stage Engineering Design Team Discussion

During the design of products and systems, a core challenge for design teams is to make choices between design concepts that reflect a group's opinion and allows decisions to be traced back over time. Underlying such decision-making is the notion of preferences in which a design team assigns priorities to a set of design choices. "Implicit Preferences in Engineering Design" presents a design team-centered approach for automatically extracting a team's preferences in an implicit, low overhead way, rather than more traditional, explicit strategies via voting, surveys or questionnaires. This work also explores how preferences evolve throughout the design decision-making process. The methods presented in this book provide a quantitative way to understand and represent qualitative design information using an information extraction method that can operate in the background, while design teams go about their normal work. An illustrative case study is included to indicate the applicability of the approaches proposed in the work.