Development of a multi-granularity design support system using hierarchical clustering for non-dominated solutions

In this paper, an improved new design support system characterized by multigranularity is proposed. Previous studies has focused on only visualization of non-dominated solutions (NDSs), but our method aims to perform a feature extraction and a problem analysis by employing hierarchical clustering and intergroup comparison. The most distinctive feature of our system is an interactive granularity control according to user´s preference. This feature enables a various granularity analysis for NDSs from macro to micro view points. In this paper, we examine the characteristics and effectiveness of the proposed approach through computational experiments on a design problem of a counter rotating axial fan turbojet engine. The design target of this problem is two fans and two turbines of the engine. We handle this task as a seven-objective design problem.