Transforming the House of Quality to a multiobjective optimization formulation

There is a tremendous gap between the sophisticated optimization methods employed by engineers and the ad hoc decision-making methods employed by engineering managers. The goal of this paper is to bridge that gap by presenting a method for transforming qualitative information obtained using the "House of Quality" (a popular engineering management tool) into a constrained multiobjective optimization problem. Subjective multiattribute utility optimization is employed to combine this qualitative design information with quantitative constraints used in typical design problems. A structural dynamics example with conflicting objectives of structural cost, maintenance cost, service life, construction duration and occupant discomfort resulting from vibration illustrates the approach.