Intelligent Decision Support Systems in Design Engineering and Product Development

Dear Colleagues,

The engineering involved in the design and development of products consists of a set of heterogeneous and multidisciplinary activities with a clear common factor: the continuous need to make decisions in environments of great uncertainty. Under the consideration of its life cycle and either in the design, manufacturing or marketing stages, the different phases through which the product progresses, from the definition of needs to the detailed design and even the subsequent stages of deactivation and end of life, all of them are conditioned by the multiplicity of decisions that the engineering team must make. These multi-criteria decisions must aim to solve everything from selection problems to optimization problems, as well as effectively managing the different sources of uncertainty present in the process. To support these decisions, intelligent systems and artificial intelligence models having the ability to perceive, reason and interact in specific environments, as well as the capacity for association and inference in solving complex problems, have been integrated with traditional decision-support systems to offer more effective, predictive and consistent solutions. This Special Issue collects all those applications of intelligent systems (agents) in supporting decisions related to design engineering and product development. Both from a theoretical and practical perspective, papers related to the conceptualization, implementation, proof of concept and comparative industrial use of these systems may be presented, highlighting the advantages they present in their support for engineering decisions and appropriately justifying the architecture and algorithms used.

Therefore, this Special Issue will host methodological developments, reviews, and theoretical discussions of Intelligent Decision-Support Systems (IDSSs) applied in Design Engineering and Product Development, with its main topics including, among others:

• Application of IDSSs;
• IDSS techniques and models;
• Machine learning and deep learning in IDSSs;
• Expert systems in the definition of IDSSs;
• Hybrid systems applied in IDSSs;
• Testing and validation of IDSSs;
• IDSS use cases;
• Future work lines and advances in IDSSs.

All interested researchers are invited to submit their papers and contribute to this Special Issue with the ultimate goal of diversifying, discussing, and expanding knowledge related to the application of IDSSs in the field of engineering design.

Prof. Dr. Jorge Cerqueiro Pequeño
Prof. Dr. José Lima
Dr. Alberto Comesaña-Campos
Guest Editors

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• intelligent systems
• decision-support systems
• engineering design
• product design
• product development
• artificial intelligence
• machine learning
• deep learning
• expert systems
• statistical inference
• symbolic inference
• intelligent agents