Investigation on Multi-Criteria Decision Making Methods Application in Sustainable Product Design

Abstract

Background: Integrating sustainability development' aspects in the design process is becoming, a growth area in companies. Consequently, sustainable product design has to consider the different aspects of sustainability throughout its life cycle phases in addition of other requirements. This integration is becoming more complicated due the difficulty of managing the constraints and alternatives related to the product and stakeholders needs. This study aims to highlights the most used Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) tools and methods used in sustainable product design process. Contribution: Product design process involves interesting decisional tasks such as the choice of materials, standard parts, technical solutions. Hence, the contribution of this work is to help designer to adopt relevant MCDM tools and methods that can be integrated to other tools to facilitate and to justify their decisional tasks. Method: Several methods have been affected to solve the problems related to this complexity such as MCDM. A literature review was conducted based on Siencedirect and GoogleScholar articles databases. After filtering more than 200 articles only 62 articles were considered to analyze the correlation between sustainable product design and MCDM. Results: Classified MCDM use according to the type of choices to achieve SPD goals. This paper allowed us to find matches between MCDM methods and SPD problem. The majority of case studies result show that a large portion of sustainable design methods, techniques, and tools are applied to the sustainable product’ along its different life cycle phases Conclusion: It is noticed that the use of MCDM methods are an important outcome in the sustainable product design process and deeply helps designers to make suitable choices. Also, several matches relating MCDM, other methods and sustainable product design sphere are discussed