A Method for Integrating Utility Analysis into an Expert System for
  Design Evaluation
  In mechanical design, there is often unavoidable uncertainty in estimates of
design performance. Evaluation of design alternatives requires consideration of
the impact of this uncertainty. Expert heuristics embody assumptions regarding
the designer's attitude towards risk and uncertainty that might be reasonable
in most cases but inaccurate in others. We present a technique to allow
designers to incorporate their own unique attitude towards uncertainty as
opposed to those assumed by the domain expert's rules. The general approach is
to eliminate aspects of heuristic rules which directly or indirectly include
assumptions regarding the user's attitude towards risk, and replace them with
explicit, user-specified probabilistic multi attribute utility and probability
distribution functions. We illustrate the method in a system for material
selection for automobile bumpers.
