Decision-maker's preferences modelling in the engineering design through the interactive goal-programming

Engineering design problems are usually formulated as non-linear problems with integer, discrete or continuous variables. This paper presents a new interactive procedure to handle these kinds of problems. This procedure is based on the interactive goal programming model and the concept of satisfaction functions which are used to elucidate and integrate explicitly the decision-maker's preferences. A record-to-record travel (RRT) technique is adapted to solve this new interactive goal programming model. The proposed approach provides a satisfactory solution in the presence of conflicting objectives with a minimum distance from the fixed goals. Two engineering design problems are presented to illustrate the applicability and the performance of the proposed interactive technique.