Using computational intelligence in fuzzy engineering design

Problems in the field of engineering design represent an important class of real world problems that typically require a fuzzy and imprecise represent ation, since relations and interactions between different aspects of a desi gn are often too complicated to allow a precise one. This article presents and discusses a new approach to model these types of problems, by incorpora ting linguistic descriptions together with a variety of user-defined trade- off strategies. An interactive computer application is introduced, using co mputational intelligence to solve the design task by producing a specially desired output under the given environmental conditions, which are partly c aused by the personal preferences of the engineer and by the expectations o f the customer. It utilizes a randomized evolutionary technique, made suita ble for the class of problems at hand, to generate and optimize design solu tions that are later identified by a clustering algorithm. Moreover, test p roblems that were solved by the application are considered. In all cases th e good solutions were obtained by evaluating only an extremely small fracti on of all possible designs.