Biological inspiration evaluation has been widely acknowledged as one of the most important phases in biologically inspired design (BID) as it substantially determines the direction of the following-up design activities. However, it is inherently an interdisciplinary assessment, which includes both the engineering domain and the biological systems. Due to the lack of knowledge at the early stage of product design, the risk assessments mainly depend on experts' subjective judgments, which values are vague, imprecise, and even inconsistent. How to objectively evaluate the biological inspiration under such uncertain and interdisciplinary scenarios remains an open issue. To bridge such gaps, this study proposes a fuzzy rough number extended multi-criteria group decision-making (MCGDM) to evaluate the biological inspiration for BID. A fuzzy rough number is introduced to represent the individual decision maker's risk assessment and aggregate respective evaluation values within the decision-making group. A fuzzy rough number extended decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory is presented to determine the criteria weights and a fuzzy rough number extended multi-attribute ideal real comparative analysis is proposed to rank the candidate biological inspirations. Experimental results and comparative analysis validate the superiority of the proposed MCGDM in handling the subjectivity and uncertainty in biological inspiration evaluation.biological inspiration evaluation, biologically inspired design, DEMATEL, fuzzy rough number, MAIRCA
| INTRODUCTIONBiologically inspired (i.e., bio-inspired) design (BID) is a promising and rapidly increasing paradigm for design innovation and sustainable design. 1 For millions of years, a huge number of biological functions, behaviors, and structures have been evolved in nature, providing a robust and efficient manner that enables plants and animals to sustain their existence in diverse ways. 2 As a knowledge-driven design methodology, BID aims to systematically mine biological knowledge (e.g., biological functions, behaviors, and structures) to resolve engineering problems, such as eco-design and design creativity-inspiring. 3 It starts with the problem formulation and follows with the problem reframing, biological inspiration identification (i.e., biological solution acquisition, biological solution definition, biological inspiration generation, and biological inspiration evaluation), and the final biological inspiration application. 4 Due to its prominent performance in creativity-inspiring and technical innovation, BID has been widely investigated in various areas and a vast amount of biomimetic applications have emerged in our daily life, such as algorithm development, 5 robotics, 6 material design, 7 optics, 8 and image processing. 9 BID is inherently interdisciplinary. 10 To facilitate the knowledge analogy between the engineering world and biological systems, designers should be equipped with a strong background in the engineering discipline as well as good expertise in the biol...