MADM with Applications in Material Selection and Optimal Design
This MIT OpenCourseWare offering, taught during MIT's January Independent Activities Period, covers multiple attribute decision making (MADM) as applied to engineering material selection. It compares conventional and advanced MADM models, then walks through a case study using these models to choose reliable materials for sensitive structural components, paired with a multi-criteria Taguchi optimization method. Additional topics include handling uncertainty in material property data, resolving disagreement among decision-makers evaluating the same design, objective methods for weighting performance indices, rank stability analysis, and the distinction between compensatory and non-compensatory decision rules. Materials consist of MIT's course notes and readings, distributed under a Creative Commons license, aimed at students who already have an engineering design background. No certificate is offered, consistent with MIT OCW's open courseware model.