Welfare economics applied to design engineering

  • Authors:
  • Donald E. Grierson

  • Affiliations:
  • Professor Emeritus, Civil Engineering Department, University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

  • Venue:
  • EG-ICE'06 Proceedings of the 13th international conference on Intelligent Computing in Engineering and Architecture
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

The paper concerns design engineering problems involving multiple criteria and, in particular, the development of a formal trade-off strategy that can be employed by designers to mutually satisfy conflicting criteria as best as possible. A Pareto-optimal exchange analysis technique is adapted from the theory of social welfare economics as the basis for a search methodology to identify good-quality compromise designs. The concepts are initially developed for the two-criteria design problem so that the main ideas can be given a simple geometric interpretation. Curve-fitting, equation-discovery and equation-solving software are employed along with welfare economics analysis to find competitive general equilibrium states corresponding to Pareto-optimal compromise designs of a flexural plate governed by conflicting weight and deflection criteria. The trade-off strategy is then extended to the design of a multi-storey building governed by three conflicting criteria concerning capital cost, operating cost and income revenue.