Constraint Dominance Methods Applied to the Design of a Linear Motor Available to Purchase

Reasoning about relationships among design constraints can facilitate objective and effective decision making at various stages of engineering design. Exploiting dominance among constraints is one particularly strong approach to simplifying design problems and to focusing designers’ attention on critical design issues. Three distinct approaches to constraint dominance identification have been reported in the literature. We lay down the basic principles of these approaches with simple examples and we apply these methods to a practical linear electric actuator design problem. The identification of dominance along with the use of Interval Propagation and Monotonicity Analysis leads to an optimal solution for a particular design configuration of the linear actuator. Identification of dominance also provides insight into the design of linear actuators, which may lead to effective decisions at the conceptual stage of the design.