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.

This study was partly supported by the Shanghai Pujiang Program (Grant/Award No. 20PJ1406600).