A Framework for the Simultaneous Multilevel Design Exploration and Decision Support of Material Structures and Manufacturing Processes

Abstract Traditional manufacturing, such as steel manufacturing, involves a series of processes to realize the final product. The properties and performance of the final product depend on the material processing history and the microstructure generated at each of the processes. Realizing target product performance requires the simultaneous design exploration of the material microstructure and processing, taking into account the multilevel interactions between the material, product, and manufacturing processes. This demands the capability to co-design, which involves sharing a ranged set of solutions through design exploration across multilevel and providing design decision support. In this paper, we present a co-design exploration framework for multilevel decision support. Using the framework, we model the interactions and couplings between the levels and facilitate simultaneous decision-based design exploration. The framework integrates the coupled compromise decision support problem construct with interpretable self-organizing maps to facilitate (i) the formulation of the multilevel decision support problems taking into account the interactions and couplings between levels, (ii) the simultaneous visualization and exploration of the multilevel design spaces, and (iii) decision-making across levels for multilevel designers. The efficacy of the framework is tested using a hot rod rolling problem focusing on the interactions between the dynamic and metadynamic phases of material recrystallization and the thermo-mechanical processing during the hot rolling process. The framework is generic and supports the co-design exploration of systems characterized by multilevel interactions, couplings, and multidisciplinary designers.