Strategic eco-design map of the complex products: toward visualisation of the design for environment

Abstract

With growing sustainability and environmental concerns regarding the products, decision-makers and business managers need to integrate sustainability into business strategies and support it via systematic business processes and decision support tools. With the integration of the eco-efficiency attributes to the product development, more data should be analysed in engineering design. This integration also increases the complexity of the design process due to the large volume of data processing and diversity of the different attributes and features of the products. In this paper, we used the stock market metaphor to develop a visual data mining approach to the strategic eco-design assessment of the complex products. We presented a fresh framework using clustering and visualisation techniques to analyse the eco-efficiency profile of the different modules, components and parts of a complex product, and provide an efficient data exploration tool for decision-makers to facilitate processing of eco-design attributes, and strategic objectives at the same time. An illustrative example is provided to show the procedure of the application and the effectiveness of the proposed approach.