Qualitative decision making with integrated systems design methodology: A case study

System design is associated with building a formal morphology of the system, comprising the process of defining the system parameters, submodels, and criteria, selecting an optimal candidate, and preparing a detail implementation plan for the chosen candidate. It is primarily a wholistic approach to engineering a system, and is differentiated from operations research and other analytical methods. Specifically, operations research may be used to help resolve problems within a system, but usually does not replace the design and development process necessary to complete a system. However, it assists in the development process of the resulting configurations.This case study introduces a set of criterion function models and algorithms for the design of systems, along with mathematical foundations for building the models. Criteria for the system are determined and candidate system values are represented as probabilities in the [0, 1] range in order to achieve ordinal ranking of candidates on a cardinal scale. Both mutually exclusive and interactive design criteria could be represented by the developed models, which allow reflection of the nature of a wide variety of real-world systems. The developed models and algorithms are illustrated with a numerical example.