Exploring Dynamic Preferences in Systems Engineering

In systems and design engineering, the success of a system is largely influenced by the satisfaction of stakeholder preferences. These stakeholder preferences are often characterized by an objective function to be used in design optimization. However, many real-world systems engineering situations involve changes in stakeholder preferences. Dynamic preferences across the life cycle of an individual system may be poorly represented by objective functions in current practices. The goal of this research is to explore dynamic preferences throughout the system life cycle phases to bring awareness to the potential impact they have on a system’s defined success criteria.