Comparing methods for the multi‐response design problem

One approach to solving multiple response engineering problems is to combine the individual responses into one unifying objective. In tility theory, several characteristics are used to compare and contrast multiple objective techniques. These are risk aversion, marginal rates of substitution, and the relationship of the responses in the combined function. Perhaps unknown to the user, multiple response techniques carry strong assumptions regarding these characteristics. This paper investigates four commonly‐used multiple objective techniques and demonstrates that each method contains assumptions about these characteristics which are not intuitively evident to a user.