EVALUATION OF SOLUTION VARIANTS IN CONCEPTUAL DESIGN BY MEANS OF ADEQUATE SENSITIVITY INDICES

Every engineering product is exposed to a multitude of uncertain influencing factors during the different stages of its life cycle. While much effort is invested to deal with this uncertainty during production and use, it often is not adequately taken into account in product development. Moreover, especially in the early design stages well-know methods of probabilistic uncertainty analysis often cannot be applied adequately. They necessitate an elaborated concept or even a mathematical description of the underlying relationships. In this contribution an approach to assess the influence of different design parameters in a network of physical effects is proposed, based on available methods for sensitivity analysis. The different indices are examined with regard to their applicability during Conceptual Design. Quantitative, but usually highly complex methods are thereby complemented by qualitative ones. In this way, the approach allows to deal with the changing as well as usually low level of information and supports the evaluation of concepts on an abstract level of description.