Optimizing Engineered Products for Their Social Impacts On Multiple Stakeholders

Abstract

Engineered products are often optimized based on engineering requirements, user requirements, cost, and performance. This strategy is well suited for most applications, but products designed specifically to improve the lives of users and communities would benefit from an approach that helps engineers optimize a product based also on its social impacts. This paper introduces several optimization problem formulations adapted from multi-stakeholder strategies in the economics and business management literature. Each optimization problem formulation optimizes a product's social impact according to the ideology and principles inherent to the adapted multi-stakeholder strategy. A case study is presented for a cassava peeling machine that is being developed for farmers in the Brazilian Amazon. Finally, the resulting peeler design configurations and social impacts are discussed to illustrate the advantages and disadvantages of each strategy.