Our goal is to relieve engineers of the drudgery of manually evaluating designs one at a time. We want to automate that process to free them up to do higher level design work: the work they became engineers to do.

       Frontier Optimization is the combination of Pareto Optimization and the Frontier graph (Click for PDF). It is a tool used in engineering design to develop the best possible product design.

       To understand these concepts consider the design of a cell phone. Cell phone manufacturers typically do not make the battery, screen, or processor used in their device. They purchase these components from other manufacturers and assemble them into the final product. Imagine comparing two different cell phone designs. They would have different costs, computing speeds, and length of battery life. If one design were worse in every way, it would not be worth considering and could be thrown out. If every possible design was compared to every other possible design, and the inferior designs eliminated, the remaining designs would be Pareto Optimal. These designs, collectively known as the Pareto Frontier, would represent the available trade-offs between the criteria used to judge the designs. For every design on the Frontier, there is no other design that is better in one criterion unless it is worse in another.

       In many cases, there will be many designs on the Pareto Frontier. In order to choose between them, they can be displayed on the Frontier graph. This graph, seen below, shows each design as a separate entry on the x-axis. Each criterion is shown as a separate y-axis with a color coded line showing the value of that criterion for its respective design. With information about the criteria for all the designs visualized in one place, the designer can make the decision as to what design represents the best trade-off between the criteria.