A Multiobjective Methodology for Selecting Subsystem Automation Options

When designing large-scale systems, managers and engineers must often balance the desire for optimality with the need for analytic tractability. When new technologies are involved the problem may be further complicated by the need to conduct local tradeoffs among risk, cost, and time factors. In order to formally deal with these issues, this paper presents a decomposition scheme in which individual subsystems may be evaluated separately and a representative set of alternatives obtained for each. In the development, a set of multiple objectives is introduced to account for the range of organizational priorities underlying the decision making process. Pareto-optimal solutions are then found with a general purpose parametric programming algorithm and ranked with the help of the Analytic Hierarchy Process. The methodology is demonstrated with an example centering on the selection of automation options for the upcoming Space Station, but is general enough to be applicable to the design of any complex system.