An Integrated Design Optimization Approach for Quantitative and Qualitative Search Space

Most of the algorithmic engineering design optimisation approaches reported in the literature aims to find the best set of solutions within a quantitative (QT) search space of the given problem while ignoring related qualitative (QL) issues. These QL issues can be very important and by ignoring them in the optimisation search, can have expensive consequences especially for real world problems. This paper presents a new integrated design optimisation approach for QT and QL search space. The proposed solution approach is based on design of experiment methods and fuzzy logic principles for building the required QL models, and evolutionary multi-objective optimisation technique for solving the design problem. The proposed technique was applied to a two objectives rod rolling problem. The results obtained demonstrate that the proposed solution approach can be used to solve real world problems taking into account the related QL evaluation of the design problem.