This award supports Professor Erik Antonsson of California Institute of Technology, Assistant Professor Kevin Otto of MIT and two graduate students of Professor Antonsson's to collaborate in fundamental research in manufacturing engineering with Professors Hans-Juergen Zimmerman and Hans-Juergen Sebastian of the Department of Operations Research of the Rheinisch-Westfaelische Technische Hochschule Aachen (RWTH-Aachen.) Both groups are utilizing the new mathematics of `fuzzy sets` to represent intrinsically imprecise information and to formalize trade-offs between conflicting goals. The US participants will benefit from joining their expertise in applying fuzzy set theory in Engineering Design research with the German experience in representing and manipulating imprecision in Configuration Design. After exploring the commonalities in their approaches, they expect to integrate them and apply the combined approach to a realistic industrial problem to test the robustness of the technique. The use of fuzzy set theory instead of utility theory is a promising new approach to dealing with decision-making under uncertainty. A unified formal method for configuration and engineering design could be applied to virtually all engineering design problems, and ought to reduce engineering design time and increase design quality, particularly in the design of large, complex systems. Increasing concurrency (the overlap of work normally done sequentially) in engineering design has the potential to significantly decrease the time required to create a successful design.
