An Integrated Method for Product Material Selection Considering Environmental Factors and a Case Study

Abstract

Materials have very important influence on the environmental impact of the product life cycle from production to disposal and recycling. The environmental factors should be considered when product materials are selected, in order to improve the environmental friendliness of products. Due to the complexity of product material selection considering technical, economic and environmental factors, it is transformed into a decision-making problem. An integrated decision-making index system is presented, and a multi-objective decision-making framework model is established according to the index system. An algorithm integrating grey relation analysis (GRA) and analytic hierarchy process (AHP) is used to aid the decision making process. A material selection case of the housing of an electronic device is introduced, which shows the feasibility and effectiveness of the model and method presented.