A hybrid approach for environmental impact evaluation of design options

The strengthened environmental regulatory requirements and general awareness of the need for environmental conservation worldwide, design for environment has become a key design criterion in new product development processes. Due to their resources-consuming attribute and the prerequisite expert knowledge in environmental sciences for the impacts interpretations, the existing forms of product-oriented environmental impact assessment methods are impractical to be adopted by product designers in small-and-medium enterprises. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a generally accepted quantitative approach to assess a product's environmental impact. However, a full LCA study often requires a considerable amount of data and therefore, it is regarded as not a handy tool for product design evaluations particularly at the initial design stage. This leads to our intention to develop an immediately applicable approach for decision-makers to evaluate the design options. The proposed approach integrates Analytic Hierarchy Process and Fuzzy Theory, with Evidential Reasoning (ER) to support the environmental impact evaluations of design options. A case study is carried out to demonstrate its applicability to prioritize the environmental impact of various design options. A symmetrical triangular distribution is introduced for calculating the expected utility and for testing the sensitivity of results.