An Integrated Decision Analysis for the Sustainable Product Design

Engineering designers consider many aspects surrounding a product’s life in order to meet safety, reliability, quality, manufacturing, and cost requirements. Most of the time this is done in an excellent way and the resulting products offers broad functionality with high quality and reasonable price. However serious considerations of integration of environmental requirements are often missed in the product development process. All products contribute to a range of environmental problems. These problems arise through the entire life cycle of products from the creation to the disposal of products. Design for environment (DfE) is the systematic consideration of design performance with respect to environmental, health, and safety objectives over the full product and process life-cycle. It takes place early in a product’s design or upgrade phase to ensure that the environmental consequences of a product’s life cycle are considered. The key issue to success is how to select the most appropriate and effective strategy for a particular product to reduce environmental impacts without disregarding the business strategies in the decision making process. In this paper, a general framework is proposed to integrate the life cycle assessment and decision analysis for prioritizing the design for environment strategy by considering uncertainty issues exist in the decision making process. A case study is illustrated focusing in the product upgrade phase. The ultimate goal is to provide a design advisory tool for product designers in the hopes of facilitating their complex decision making processes by considering the environmental issues in mind.