An interactive multiple objective optimization approach with application to hydrostatic bearing design

This dissertation develops an interactive multiple objective decision making procedure. The developed procedure is designed to guide the decision maker through the set of efficient solutions to their best compromise solution. Interactive multiple objective solution approaches have been criticized for having very limiting assumptions and requiring the decision maker to supply difficult information. The purpose of this research was to develop a multiple objective procedure that could find the best compromise solution without requiring the decision maker to supply explicit trade-off information.; The procedure developed in this research uses the constraint method to solve multiple objective decision making problems. Decision makers are required to rank the objectives at each iteration. From these rankings, efficient solutions are found for the decision maker to analyze. To demonstrate the procedure's effectiveness, 22 decision makers used the procedure to solve an example decision making problem. The procedure was also used to solve a hydrostatic bearing design problem.