This paper emphasizes the necessity of formally bringing qualitative and quantitative criteria of ergonomic design together, and provides a novel complementary design framework with this aim. Within this framework, different design criteria are viewed as optimization objectives, and design...

Consideration of qualitative factors is an integral and necessary part of design optimization. In this paper, we consider qualitative factors as design objectives to be optimized and attempt to optimize qualitative and quantitative criteria together. Interactive evolutionary computation (IEC)...

Interactive Evolutionary Computation (IEC) utilises humancomputer interaction as part of system optimisation and therefore constitutes an ideal platform for developing and improving systems that are subjectively influenced. Recently, interest in the usage of IEC for subjectively influenced...

The concept of qualitativeness in design is an important one, and needs to be incorporated in the optimization process for a number of reasons outlined in this paper. interactive evolutionary computation and fuzzy systems are two of the widely used approaches for handling quanlitativeness in...

The manufacturing industry is characterized by large-scale interdependent networks as companies buy goods from one another, but do not control or design the overall flow of materials. The result is a complex emergent structure with which companies connect to each other. The topology of this...