Decision Support for Configuration Systems of Industrialized Constructions

The limitation in the design space of industrialized housing opens up possibilities for the creation of customer focused configuration systems and for increased level of design automation. The creation and performance analysis of design variants can be made quicker and be of better quality with the help of such configuration systems. Still the selection of the optimal alternative from the increasing number of design variants can be difficult when several interrelated and many times contradicting design parameters are available. Therefore the application of decision-making methods in helping the decision process is desirable. This paper is demonstrating the implementation of the decision-making framework called Smart DMF for an intended experimental configuration system. The product of the implementation is a software module supplementing a previously developed automated analysis module with the addition of new aspects like cost and user satisfaction factors. With the help of the Smart DMF module the otherwise complex picture of comparing design variants can be simplified; each variant can have a cumulative overall rating which helps to make the decisions sounder and less affected by the biases of human decisions. Moreover, we will see that after the capture of the decision making criteria and parameters the module can be used to find optimal design variants automatically.