Pitfalls of the Typical Construction of Decision Matrices for Concept Selection

The conceptual design phase of the engineering design process can be divided into three general activities (i) function specification, (ii) concept generation, and (iii) concept selection. In this paper we explore the pitfalls of one of the most popular approaches for concept selection – namely decision matrices. Although powerful in many cases, methods based on decision matrices may fail to aid designers in selecting potentially preferable...