The basis of applying SBCE and JIT-DM is to enable
concurrent design by generating sets of feasible solutions
that can later be narrowed down by superposing different
stakeholders’ criteria in the form of design constraints. The
traditional multi-objective design paradigm in product
development processes follows an “optimization” type of
mind-set. That is, setting up design requirements,
constraints and an multi-objective function first, and then
solving the design problem by proposing candidate
solutions that can be optimized further to meet the desired
criteria. In contrast to this approach, the SBCE logic is one
of first generating sets of feasible solutions for each quality
measure, and then combining the resulting sets and applying
the design constraints to select the most appropriate
solution. When no feasible solutions are found at the
intersections, four requirements engineering practices can
be chosen to be applied: (1) negotiate new trade-offs
between conflicting goals and constraints, (2) remove and
relax design constraints to accommodate the determined
solutions, (3) focus the solution generation on specific zones
of the solution space with more chances to find non
conflicting solutions, or (4) redefine the requirements based
on the past experience and start all over again.
The functionality of CAS supports this design principles
in several ways. Firstly, CAS enables designers in entering
their own knowledge rules to steer the generation process.