Interactive Product Design Selection With an Implicit Value Function

We present a new method to aid a decision maker (DM) in selecting the “most preferred” from a set of design alternatives. The method is deterministic and assumes that the DM’s preferences reflect an implicit value function that is quasi-concave. The method is interactive, with the DM stating preferences in the form of attribute tradeoffs at a series of trial designs, each a specific design under consideration. The method is iterative and uses the gradient of the value function obtained from the preferences of the DM to eliminate lower value designs at each trial design. We present an approach for finding a new trial design at each iteration. We provide an example, the design selection for a cordless electric drill, to demonstrate the method. We provide results showing that (within the limit of our experimentation) our method needs only a few iterations to find the most preferred design alternative. Finally we extend our deterministic selection method to account for uncertainty in the attributes when the probability distributions governing the uncertainty are known.