Multi-criteria decision making for the design of building facade

Most engineering designs involve evaluation of several performance criteria. Usually these criteria conflict with each other and identifying good compromise solutions is difficult. While multi-criteria optimization approaches, such as Pareto filtering, have been applied to this task, not much attention has been paid to the selection of a single best solution. A new algorithm for selecting the best compromise solution that closely corresponds to the human decision-making process is presented in this paper. This algorithm, called RR-PARETO3, iteratively eliminates worst solutions according to multiple criteria from a population of possible solutions. A facade design example is selected for illustration and to evaluate the performance of the algorithm. It is shown that the algorithm is capable of identifying good compromise solutions that achieve reasonable trade-offs among conflicting criteria.