Multicriteria Decision Making for Product Design in the Scope of Sustainable Development

Abstract

Product design within the framework of sustainable development is an important problem, especially when the supply chain is worldwide as it is, for example, in the textile garment industry. Many papers deal with multicriteria decision systems within the framework of life cycle assessment, but in the current literature the two other components of sustainable development (ethics and economy) are not really taken in account. Furthermore, many discussions about the validity of the results of life cycle assessment appear. To cope with the lack of knowledge about ethics factors or about the level of natural resources and recyclability processes and still make a good design decision is difficult. This paper proposes a decision support system aimed at helping the decision maker to choose between design scenarios in the SD context.