Decision making with implementation dependent feedback

The earliest design decisions in the conceptual design phase incur the largest investment costs: decisions about the functions and features to be implemented, the significant attributes of quality to be considered, the relevant design criteria used for concept evaluation and comparison, and the final selection of the most promising concept itself. A poorly chosen design concept cannot be transformed into a beneficial one by means of number crunching. Concept selection should consider proportionally economic, technical, political, and environmental aspects. Usually the advantages and disadvantages of each alternative are in some kind of balance, and concept selection becomes a complex decision problem. It can be attacked with the Analytic Network Process (ANP). Prerequisite for engineering application and industry acceptance is a consistent coupling of the subjective intangibles with the objective performance measures obtained from economic and technical analysis. This coupling is achieved with the novel approach of Implementation Dependent Feedback.