Decision Making in Engineering Design

This course is a part of Reliability and Decision Making in Engineering Design, a 1-course MicroMasters series from edX.

Decision making is an essential activity in all organizations and teams involved in engineering design and product development. Successful design requires the ability to make good decisions in the presence of risk and uncertainty, and an understanding of how customers and other stakeholders make decisions.

This course provides a rigorous foundation of decision making by bringing together theories and knowledge from diverse fields of study and applying them to the engineering design context. The key topics covered in the course include multi-objective decision making under risk and uncertainty, group decision making, model-based and data-driven decision making, and heuristics & biases in human decisions. Example applications in engineering design including estimation of customer preferences, simulation-based design, and sustainable design.

The course would benefit a wide range of practitioners and active learners, whether they are entry-level engineers or transitioning into engineering management roles. The course content is suitable for individuals will an undergraduate degree in engineering or a related field. Basic knowledge of programming (in any programming language) is expected.

What you'll learn

• Learn to formulate design decisions under risk and uncertainty
• Learn to apply multi-attribute utility theory to make decisions in engineering design.
• Understand the assumptions and limitations of commonly used decision-making methods.
• Identify and reduce biases in design decision making.
• Adopt an interdisciplinary approach to design across engineering, economics, and social sciences.