EVALUATION OF DESIGN ALTERNATIVES IN MECHANICAL-ENGINEERING

The paper gives a description of a structure dedicated to evaluation of design alternatives in mechanical engineering. A list of particular features of the system such as its ability to cope with fuzziness and a uniform way of treating various criteria involved in design processes is given and discussed in length. Special attention is focused on empirical engineering-oriented aspects of membership functions estimation with a particular emphasis on expressing achieved precision. The paper re-analyzes some existing methods of multiobjective decision-making. Some original contributions of the study to this area are focussed on developing new indices significantly facilitating interpretation of results of ranking (such as e.g. specificity of different alternatives as well as strength of dominance observed among them). An illustration of the performance of the system is completed with the aid of an evaluation of different types of joints found in hydraulic cylinders.