Design Space Exploration and Evaluation Using Margin-Based Trade-Offs
Journal article, 2024

Design space exploration and margin analysis can inform critical decisions early in engineering design, helping to handle the uncertainties of early design while ensuring design performance. In practice, the complexity of many products makes such decision-making challenging. This paper addresses the challenge with a new design framework that relies on the margin value method to evaluate sets of concepts that are combinatorially generated from an enhanced function-means tree. The basis for concept comparison is the margin value in each design alternative. The margin value method is expanded to address a broad class of design problems by using surrogate models and novel metrics for evaluating different conceptual alternatives. Visualization tools are introduced to support the evaluations. The efficacy of the framework is demonstrated using the design of a structural aeroengine component involving simulation models and uncertain load specifications. Overall, this paper shows how design concepts can be compared objectively and distilled to a set of alternatives that would retain their values throughout product development.

parallel coordinates

design margins

design space exploration

design under uncertainty

margin value method

set-based design

Author

Khalil Al Handawi

McGill University

Arindam Brahma

Chalmers, Industrial and Materials Science, Product Development

David C. Wynn

University of Auckland

Michael Kokkolaras

McGill University

Ola Isaksson

Chalmers, Industrial and Materials Science, Product Development

Journal of Mechanical Design - Transactions of the ASME

1050-0472 (ISSN)

Vol. 146 6 061701

Subject Categories

Other Mechanical Engineering

Design

Signal Processing

Areas of Advance

Production

DOI

10.1115/1.4063966

More information

Latest update

8/7/2024 1