Modeling Imprecision in Engineering Design

Abstract

The background, terminology, and theory of a technique (called the Method of Imprecision or MOI) to formally represent and manipulate imprecise information in engineering design calculations is reviewed here [3, 29, 30, 33, 36, 37, 38, 39, 43, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60]. The method utilizes fuzzy sets to capture designers’ and customers’ preferences. Formal methods for including noise, trade-off strategies and design iteration are included.Two illustrative examples (one of an air tank design, the other the design of a braking system for a passenger vehicle) are presented. The examples emphasize a compareson of different solution alternatives during preliminary engineering design, involving realisti..