ProSET: a decision support system for sustainability performance evaluation

Abstract

In recent years, many industries are looking into sustainability aspects for the future product development. Although a number of studies have been conducted on considering sustainability during the product development process, an approach to assist product designers in making final decision of designed products has not been comprehensively investigated. Due to that reason, a new methodology has been proposed in the previous work by Hassan et al. (2015). Basically, the purpose of the previous work was to evaluate sustainability level of designed part configurations taking into consideration various factors needed for enabling sustainability. During the previous work, a sustainability evaluation model was developed where the sustainability score was calculated. However, manual calculation of sustainability score consumes more time and requires knowledgeable person in charge. Thus, in order to avoid such inadequacies, this paper presents a computer-based decision support system named Product Sustainability Evaluation Tool (ProSET). The system uses weighted decision matrix as the platform and calculates the Weighted Sustainability Score (WSS) by quantifying 26 sustainability metrics throughout the total product's life-cycle using neural network model. This developed DSS of ProSET will assist product designers to analyze various aspects of sustainability within product development process toward further improvement of it.