Title: Sustainable path modelling: a tool for sustainable product development

Authors: P.L. Biju; P.R. Shalij; G.V. Prabhushankar

Addresses: Department of Mechanical Engineering, Government Engineering College-Thrissur, Kerala, India ' Department of Mechanical Engineering, Government Engineering College-Thrissur, Kerala, India ' Industrial Engineering and Management, Siddaganga Institute of Technology, Tumkur, Karnataka, India

Abstract: The quest for a product development method that demands sustainability has led to the development of a new tool named 'sustainable path modelling' (SPM). This tool helps to identify alternative options at every stage of product development cycle. These options termed as 'paths', are generated in various stages of product development. For each product development stage, an SPM matrix is constructed with different options and for each option path scores are calculated. Various combinations of paths and their total path scores are calculated subsequently. The path with the highest total path score is considered as the best path for the development of a customer satisfied sustainable product. A case study has been conducted in a bottle manufacturing industry for illustrating the effectiveness of the SPM tool. A sustainable product development path that satisfies various customer requirements has been evolved for a product - 500 ml edible oil bottle. The validation of the proposed tool has also been carried out.

Keywords: sustainable product development; SPD; sustainable manufacturing; new product development; sustainable NPD; product development cycle; rank order centroid; ROC weight; sustainable path modelling; bottle manufacturing; customer requirements.

DOI: 10.1504/IJISE.2017.081915

International Journal of Industrial and Systems Engineering, 2017 Vol.25 No.3, pp.297 - 317

Received: 20 Nov 2014
Accepted: 31 Jan 2015
Published online: 31 Jan 2017 *

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