Title: A multi-objective optimisation methodology towards product design for sustainability

Authors: Yunpeng Li; Utpal Roy

Addresses: Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY 13244, USA ' Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY 13244, USA

Abstract: Design for sustainability (DFS) brings broader disciplines into the design decision making process. Numerous DFS approaches can be separately used to evaluate a product design's performance in a particular domain. However, taking consideration of all sustainability related domains together into the early design stages impose large amounts of design variables and constraints onto the design problem and possibly make the problem infeasible to solve. In this paper, we propose an object-oriented multi-objective optimisation methodology to help designers to determine an optimal combination of design parameters (DP), based on a set of predefined design variables, sustainability related constraints and objective functions, to achieve the functional requirements (FR). By encapsulating design variables into few global objects, the searching space for the optimisation model is reduced. A case study has been presented to illustrate and to validate the feasibility of the proposed methodology.

Keywords: sustainable manufacturing; sustainability; design for sustainability; DFS; quality function deployment; design for assembly; design for manufacturing; life cycle assessment; multi-objective optimisation; global optimisation; object-oriented optimisation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSEAM.2018.092234

International Journal of Strategic Engineering Asset Management, 2018 Vol.3 No.2, pp.154 - 176

Published online: 11 Jun 2018 *

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