Considering dynamic Pareto frontiers in decision making

Considering how the resolution of conflicts changes over time is an aspect of multiobjective optimization that is not commonly explored. These considerations embody changes in both the preferences that dictate the selection of Pareto designs, and changes in the Pareto frontier itself over time, or s-Pareto frontier when a set of disparate design concepts are considered. As such, this paper explores the idea of dynamic s-Pareto frontiers and preferences. Specifically, this paper presents a dynamic multiobjective optimization problem formulation that provides a framework of identifying the s-Pareto frontier for a series of time steps. The application of the presented dynamic formulation is illustrated through a simple aircraft design example. Through this example it was observed that the identification of the dynamic s-Pareto frontier enabled the observation of the impact of design decisions on the offset of selected designs from the identified dynamic frontier. By measuring and minimizing the aircraft design offset, the selected aircraft design offset was improved by an average of roughly 60 % from the next best selected alternative identified using traditional selection methods.