Quantitative methods for tradeoff analyses

A Corrigendum has been published for this article in Systems Engineering 4: 190–212, 2001. Practicing engineers often find the tools and techniques used for investigating alternative system designs to be cumbersome or complicated. This article will show that these systems engineering tools and techniques are in fact quite simple and can provide critical insight into how stakeholder requirements drive the engineering design process. This helps ensure that customer requirements are satisfied throughout the entire system lifecycle and aids in reducing expensive design iterations due to poorly understood or poorly documented requirements. These goals are achieved by deriving figures of merit and combining them using standard scoring functions to steer efforts towards fulfilling the customer's objectives early in the design process. Few papers in the literature capture the basic elements of tradeoff analyses in a way that entices the engineer to utilize the techniques. We have attempted to ameliorate this problem. Most of the practices presented in the literature are written from a decision analysis perspective. The success of such techniques is dependent on the expertise of the analyst in that several of the methods require considerable analyst experience for them to be employed effectively. This paper presents standardized methodologies for carrying out tradeoff analyses, which are applicable to a wide array of problems and also demonstrates that these techniques are relatively simple to use. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Syst Eng 4: 190–212, 2001