The Effect of Stakeholder Interactions on Design Decisions

The success of an engineering project typically involves multiple stakeholders beyond the designer alone, such as customers, regulators, or design competitors. Each of these stakeholders is a dynamic decision maker, optimizing their decisions in order to maximize their own profits. However, traditional design optimization often does not account for these interactions, or relies on approximations of stakeholder preferences. Utilizing game theory, we propose a framework for understanding the types of interactions that may take place and their effect on the design optimization formulation. These effects can be considered as an economic uncertainty that arises due to limited information about interactions between stakeholders. This framework is demonstrated for a simple example of interactions between an aircraft designer and an airline. It is found that even in the case of very simple interactions, changes in market conditions can have a significant impact on stakeholder behaviors and therefore on the optimal design. This suggests that these interactions should be given consideration during design optimization.