An information-decision framework for the multilevel co-design of products, materials, and manufacturing processes

Realizing products that meet targeted performance requires careful consideration of the material processing to identify appropriate material microstructures and associated mechanical properties. The integrated design of such systems involving products, materials, and manufacturing processes necessitates facilitating co-design - a collective and coordinated effort by the product, materials, and process designers at multilevel to share their resources, information, and knowledge for making effective design decisions using the Processing-microStructure-Property-Performance (PSPP) relations. Goal-oriented Inverse Design (GoID) is one approach to co-designing these systems. In GoID, multilevel decisions are targeted at meeting the goals propagated inversely from the top level in the design hierarchy. Nevertheless, achieving the inversely propagated goals from one level may not be feasible at another level owing to the goal targets, established constraints, and available bounds. This results in design conflicts between multilevel decisions, leading to a loss in multilevel and system performance. In this paper, we propose an information‐decision framework to model goal-directed, multilevel decision-making and interactions for products, materials, and manufacturing processes, detect potential conflicts between the multilevel decisions, and regulate the decisions to achieve improved multilevel and system performance. Decision regulation is achieved by studying the sensitivity of the goals to dominant design variables and constraints and making appropriate design modifications. We use a hot rod rolling problem to showcase the efficacy of the proposed framework in systematically detecting and managing conflicts while co-designing the product, material, and manufacturing processes involved. The framework is generic and facilitates the top-down co-design of multilevel systems involving products, materials, and manufacturing processes.