A linguistic approach to assess the dynamics of design team preference in concept selection
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2014-dongEtal.pdf
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Author(s)
Dong, Andy
Sarkar, Somwrita
Honda, Tomonori
Yang, Maria
Date Issued
November 2013
Journal
Research in Engineering Design
Publisher
Springer-Verlag
Citation
Dong, Andy, Somwrita Sarkar, Maria C. Yang, and Tomonori Honda. “A Linguistic Approach to Assess the Dynamics of Design Team Preference in Concept Selection.” Research in Engineering Design 25, no. 1 (January 2014): 75–92.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
This paper addresses the problem of describing the decision-making process of a committee of engineers based upon their verbalized linguistic appraisals of alternatives. First, we show a way to model an individual’s evaluation of an alternative through natural language based on the Systemic-Functional Linguistics system of APPRAISAL. The linguistic model accounts for both the degree of intensity and the uncertainty of expressed evaluations. Second, this multi-dimensional linguistic model is converted into a scalar to represent the degree of intensity and a probability distribution function for the stated evaluation. Finally, we present a Markovian model to calculate the time-varying change in preferential probability, the probability that an alternative is the most preferred alternative. We further demonstrate how preferential probability toward attributes of alternatives correspond to preferential probability toward alternatives. We illustrate the method on two case studies to highlight the time-variant dynamics of preferences toward alternatives and attributes. This research contributes to process tracing in descriptive decision science to understand how engineers actually take decisions.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Engineering Systems Division
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Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1007/s00163-013-0165-1
