MULTICRITERIA DECISION-MAKING IN GERMAN AUTOMOTIVE INDUSTRY USING FUZZY-LOGIC

In recent years, fuzzy logic technologies have been widely applied to control applications in engineering, where they are now considered an enabling technology for intelligent control systems. Fuzzy logic exped ites the design of complex systems by allowing heuristic control strat egies to be formulated by natural-language rules rather than mathemati cal models. Hence, the essence of fuzzy logic is its ability to put en gineering expertise right into an algorithm. The domain of such a tech nology is not limited to control engineering, it can also be applied t o incorporate complex decision making and the analysis of numerical da ta into non-control systems. This paper covers such an application, re alized at Mercedes-Benz in Germany. For the optimization of the design process of truck components, such as gear boxes, the 'maturity' of a current component development needs to be evaluated. The objective is to reduce the amount of existing data of the development project to a single parameter, describing the overall maturity of the design.