EVALUATION PROCESS SUPPORT IN MECHATRONICS DESIGN

The design of mechatronic systems involves different technical and scientific disciplines and it is often difficult to arbitrate between engineers' points of view so as to satisfy consumers' needs. In order to converge to satisfactory tradeoffs, designers have to collaborate although they often can understand neither other designers' issues nor their solving methods. Thus there is no guarantee each designer has spent the needed effort to reach some global optimum. Moreover, the number of design parameters is generally high and it may be difficult to grasp their influence on the design criteria that even can be contradictory. The purpose of this research is to propose methods and tools in order to help designers to evaluate candidate solutions. At this aim, an original heuristic based approach is proposed to compute non-dominated solution sets i.e. Pareto fronts. The analysis of the candidate solutions is facilitated using Self Organization Maps which provide designers with easy readable two dimensional cards. Our approach is fully illustrated in the case of the design of a 2-Degrees Of Freedom robot.