Environmental Impact Evaluations on Product Design Alternatives Using the Combined Evidential Reasoning with Fuzzy Set

Abstract

Owing to the rise of societal awareness and hence governmental quest for environmental conservation worldwide, environmental friendliness in products has become a critical design consideration for all manufacturers during new product development. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a comprehensive method to quantitatively assess the environmental burdens of products or services. However, such studies are difficult to carry out at the early product development process because of uncertain or limited product information. Also, LCA is a time and resource-consuming methodology. This paper proposes a shortcut approach to support product designers to carry out the environmental impact evaluations especially in the initial product development stage. This paper discusses the key challenges of implementing environmental impact evaluation in new product development. The combined Evidential Reasoning (ER) and Fuzzy Set Theory (FST) approach is applied to handle the uncertain information of the environmental data and deficiency of LCA. The result demonstrates the superiority of the combined ER and FST for evaluating several design alternatives while the uncertain information has been considered.