A normative decision analysis method for the sustainability-based design of products

Abstract

This paper introduces a new normative decision analysis method for the sustainability-based design of products (NASDOP). It is based on the fundamental principles of normative decision-making methods for design optimisation when multiple and often conflicting criteria influence the design of products. A unique feature of NASDOP is that it enables direct consideration of both environmental and economic impacts during a design process. Furthermore, NASDOP takes full advantage of the enhanced life cycle assessment (LCA) capabilities, reflecting the increase in knowledge about the material and energy flows of various processes in recent years, and offers a methodical approach to account for the inherent uncertainty associated with such knowledge. This paper details the development of sustainability models, including the effective integration of LCA mathematical models combined with compatible life cycle costing models from the early stages of conceptual design for use throughout the entire design process. This paper also highlights the design and deployment of hypothetical equivalents and inequivalents method, a proven normative decision method, to consistently model the preferences of a designer during sustainable product design. The implementation and usefulness of NASDOP are demonstrated with the aid of an illustrative case study and the results are discussed.

An Integrated Approach to Information Modeling for the Sustainable Design of Products

“…NASDOP deploys (Life Cycle Assessment) LCA mathematical models with compatible (Life Cycle Costing) LCC models to consider both environmental and economic objectives during the evaluation of design alternatives. This work builds upon our prior work [3] in an important way. We provide a framework in which information pertaining to any applicable standards and regulations (henceforth only referred to as standards) is revealed transparently.…”

“…Thurston and her associates provided a constrained optimization methodology for sustainable product solutions [27,31]. More recently, HEIM was used to model the preferences of the decision maker in NASDOP [3]. Here, the uncertainties in the data from environmental emissions and costs were taken into account.…”

“…Here, we introduce a Decision Method Ontology to represent the methodology for modeling the preferences among different criteria by using HEIM. HEIM has been implemented effectively in a sustainable design situation [3]. Furthermore, the units ontology from NASA [33] is integrated within this framework to verify that consistent units are used appropriately.…”

“…A number of different LCA methods were developed to characterize, group, normalize, and weight the impacts for assessment. We use the EDIP 2003 method within SimaPro for consistency with the NASDOP methodology that we developed to deploy multi-criteria decision making for sustainable product design [3].…”

“…To this end, we explore the integration of guidelines for standards with our earlier work in decision making for sustainability. In recent work [3], we introduced a normative decision analysis method for the sustainability-based design of products (NASDOP). NASDOP deploys (Life Cycle Assessment) LCA mathematical models with compatible (Life Cycle Costing) LCC models to consider both environmental and economic objectives during the evaluation of design alternatives.…”