A Method to Assign Weights of Importance to Design Requirements in Human-Machine Systems Design

Abstract

The use of the constant sum paired comparison method and a PC software package are demonstrated for assigning the weights of importance to the non-monetary system requirements in the preliminary design phase of the system design process. Current methods of assigning the overall importance weight to the non-monetary system requirements appear to be inadequate in terms of accuracy and validation. The constant sum paired comparison method, investigated in this paper proved to be an explicit and simple method of assigning the overall importance weights. The relationship between the importance weights and the assigned comparison scores can be expressed by a linear function. A PC software package utilizing the constant sum paired comparison method to assign the overall importance weight to non-monetary system requirements was developed for solving two distinct problem situations: 1) single set of requirements and 2) multiple sets of requirements.