A framework for the choices of design alternatives

A software design process is to build a system that satisfies the customer's requirements which are often not crisply defined. Thus, design engineers often need to make design trade-off decisions to choose a set of design alternatives that satisfies the requirements as much as possible. In this paper, we propose a formal framework to assist design engineers in choosing design alternatives. Our approach uses fuzzy logic to represent quality requirements and design alternatives. Based on the representations, we can identify the impacts of design alternatives on requirements, infer the implicit impacts through hierarchical structures, and assist design engineers in the determination of a set of design alternatives. The goal of this research is to guide design engineers in evaluating design alternatives, to reduce design errors, to facilitate design rationale capture, and to build a system that better satisfies the customer.