A Proposal for a Decision Support Framework to Solve Design Problems in the Automotive Industry

Decision-makers often rely on heuristics and experience to make complex decisions in the industrial context. Often, integrating implicit or expert knowledge as well as uncertainties can lead to decisions that are not necessarily the best ones. Moreover, in engineering design, the decision-making approaches focus on the product itself and do not investigate the necessary effort that is needed to gather additional data in order to devise more precise decision-making models. In our research, we propose to integrate this estimation of additional effort needed for data gathering and decision-making refinement in order to support design teams. This research has been conducted in collaboration with a major car manufacturing company, and in particular in the development process through Modeling and Simulation. The objective is to propose a decision-making model that integrates data-gathering estimation, hence integrating also the estimation of postponing one decision. A decision problem model based upon expected utility combined with the value of information theory is proposed to address this issue. The model has been developed and tested on 4 case studies. We define a decision support framework by integrating the model into a tool and by proposing roles in the decision-making process. We finally present its application on a concrete example.