Evidential reasoning-based Fuzzy AHP approach for the evaluation of design alternatives' environmental performances

With the growing general awareness of the need to protect the environment as well as the increasingly stringent regulatory requirements imposed by various national and cross-national bodies, manufacturers have to minimise the environmental impacts of their products. Environmental considerations have therefore become a new key criterion for evaluating design alternatives during the product development stage. To facilitate non-Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) experts, such as most product designers, in evaluating the design alternatives in terms of environmental friendliness, this paper introduces a decision-making mechanism that combines the multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) approaches with LCA methodology. This evidential reasoning-based approach is a fast-track and objective tool which ranks the available design alternatives according to their potential environmental impacts. The environmental impacts of design alternatives assessed by the LCA are used for the weight elicitation processes of the proposed approach. A case application is conducted to illustrate the use of the proposed method to evaluate the environmental performances of design alternatives.