Hurricanes are one of the most significant causes of human and material losses in the Caribbean region. These events have demonstrated their devastating impact on housing and infrastructure. The assessment of the vulnerability of buildings with light roofs, at the initial design stage, is considered to be a fundamental step in the mitigation of these damages and losses. This paper presents the introduction of an indicator-based vulnerability assessment in an effort to mitigate these damages in advance. This indicator facilitates the design team's decision to select the appropriate light roof alternative subject to strong winds at the conceptual stage of the process. The indicators that contribute to the conceptual assessment of vulnerability were identified based on a comprehensive review of the literature and numerical simulations of the risk scenarios using CFD/FEM software’s. The ranking of indicator weights was determined by the Kano method according to experts' opinions. A desktop application has been developed for the assessment of the vulnerability of light roof variants for buildings at the conceptual design stage. The results reported in a case study demonstrate the viability of the desktop application based on the vulnerability indicator to assist decision making in the conceptual design stage.

Deciding conceptual stage of engineering design to identify an optimal design concept from a set of alternatives is a task of great interest for manufacturers because it has an impact on profitability of the manufacturing firms in terms of extending product demand life cycle and gaining more market share. To achieve this task, design concepts encompassing all required attributes are developed and the decision is made on the optimal design concept. This article proposes the modeling of decision making in the conceptual design stage of a product as a multi-criteria decision making analysis. The proposition is based on the fact that the design concepts can be decided based on considering the available design features and various sub-features under each design feature. Pairwise comparison matrix of fuzzy analytic hierarchy process is applied to determine the weights for all design features and their sub-features depending on the importance to the design features to the optimal design and contributions of the sub-features to the performance of the main design features. Fuzzified Pugh matrices are developed for assessing the availability of the sub-features in the design concept. The cumulative from the Pugh matrices produced a pairwise comparison matrix for the design features from which the design concepts are ranked using a minimum degree of possibility. The result obtained show that the decision process did not arbitrarily apportion weights to the design concepts because of the moderate differences in the final weights.