Abstract
Response surface methodology (RSM) is one of popular tools to support a systematic improvement of quality of design in the product and process development stages. It consists of statistical modeling and optimization tools. RSM can be viewed as a knowledge management tool in that it systemizes knowledge about a manufacturing process through a big data analysis on products and processes. The conventional RSM aims to optimize the mean of a response, whereas dual-response surface optimization (DRSO), a special case of RSM, considers not only the mean of a response but also its variability or standard deviation for optimization. Recently, a posterior preference articulation approach receives attention in the DRSO literature. The posterior approach first seeks all (or most) of the nondominated solutions with no articulation of a decision maker (DM)'s preference. The DM then selects the best one from the set of nondominated solutions a posteriori. This method has a strength that the DM can understand the trade-off between the mean and standard deviation well by looking around the nondominated solutions. A posterior method has been proposed for DRSO. It employs an interval selection strategy for the selection step. This strategy has a limitation increasing inefficiency and complexity due to too many iterations when handling a great number (e.g., thousands ~ tens of thousands) of nondominated solutions. In this paper, a TOPSIS-based method is proposed to support a simple and efficient selection of the most preferred solution. The proposed method is illustrated through a typical DRSO problem and compared with the existing posterior method.