Development of an intelligent system for supporting design decision-making in the creation of automated technical complexes

Abstract

The shift from standardized design of automated technical complexes towards multi-variant elaboration of the system concept at early stages has moved the principal burden of choice onto the preliminary and technical design phases, where the number of competing design decisions grows faster than the capacity for their manual expert reconciliation. A mismatch arises: formalized variant-screening procedures are well developed for technological and managerial tasks, whereas for design decisions concerning the technical complex as a whole they remain fragmented and poorly coordinated with one another. The aim of the work is to construct an author's model of an intelligent decision support system that combines a hierarchy of heterogeneous criteria, control over the consistency of expert judgments, and an assessment of the robustness of the recommendation. On a model problem of choosing among five complex-configuration variants, integral scores were computed across four criteria clusters, a weight sensitivity analysis was carried out by scenario perturbation, and a ranking simulation of 10 000 runs was performed. It was found that the integral score of the leading variant separates from the pursuing group beyond the confidence interval, whereas the second to fourth places are statistically indistinguishable; the rank stability of the leader reaches 78,4% of runs. A comparison with unformalized expert ranking and with an equal-weight additive convolution reveals an increase in agreement with the reference ranking from 61,5 to 88,3%. The obtained relations indicate that the value of intelligent support at early stages is determined not by an increase in the accuracy of absolute estimates but by the separation of the stable part of the ranking from the unstable one, whereby the subject of the design decision shifts from the search for a single best variant towards the identification of a group of equally admissible ones.