An engineering approach: Hierarchical optimization criteria

An area of difficulty in the effective application of modern optimization techniques is often the choice of a performance criterion which adequately reflects the various factors of importance in the proper proportions. This short paper presents an approach appropriate to problems in which two or more performance measures can be ranked as "most important," "next most important," etc. It involves the successive application of the performance measures, with the constraint set at a given stage in the process being chosen on the basis of the results obtained in the previous stages. The resulting optimal control may be a much better compromise choice between the competing criteria than might be obtained by blind reliance on some preselected criterion.