Design Theory and Methods using CAD/CAE

2.2. Conventional Methods

Numerous methods developed decades ago are commonly employed to aid decision making. We introduce representative and popular methods that in general support decisions at high and mid-levels, including the decision matrix and decision tree. Readers are referred elsewhere (Akao 2004; Lochner and Matar 1990; Park and Antony 2008) for other popular methods, such as quality function deployment, the Taguchi method, and Six Sigma.

2.2.1. Decision Matrix Method

Decision matrix techniques are used to define attributes, weigh them, and appropriately sum the weighted attributes to give a relative ranking among design alternatives. Note that, in practice, attributes are weighted as numeric figure based on a prescribed ranking system ...