Evaluation of sustainability performance of product design element concepts using analytic hierarchy process

Abstract

Integrating sustainable product design into the design process has been acknowledged nowadays by many companies for producing sustainable products. The integration should be implemented during the early stage of product development process so that the sustainability of the product can be evaluated before manufacturing the product. Although a number of studies have been conducted on the integration in many aspects along with many approaches, evaluation of the sustainability of the product during its total life-cycle while it is being designed has not been comprehensively investigated. In this paper, Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is used to evaluate product design element concept during conceptual design stage by providing a weightage of sustainability metrics throughout the total life-cycle of product and finalize the preferred product design configuration by selecting the highest sustainability index of the design element concept. The approach is useful for product designers to design many concepts of product design elements and then to select the most likely sustainable design element to configure in one complete product. An example of an armed chair is used to demonstrate this approach.