| The problem addressed in this research was to develop an approach for the simultaneous green design of products and associated manufacturing processes including demanufacturing concerns. We propose a generic approach called Integrated Environmentally Conscious Design and Manufacturing (IECDM) which can be applied to address problems in the ECDM domain.; IECDM incorporates environmental considerations into the engineering design process, thereby increasing a product's total life-cycle value (including its end-of-life value) as experienced by the customer, manufacturer, and society, while simultaneously reducing impacts on the environment caused by that product and its manufacturing processes. IECDM is a novel integration of Quality Function Deployment (QFD), Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA), Multiple Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM), and Cost-Benefit Assessment (CBA). The focus is on process, based on modification of the traditional QFD methodology to incorporate environmental issues and green product-design decisions through the life-cycle design activities of synthesis, analysis, and evaluation.; This dissertation presents a QFD-based IECDM approach, a mathematical CBA model, and an IDDS (integrated Design Decision-Support) framework with a design-flow-chart application for incorporating environmental criteria into product and process eco-design. The IECDM problem is defined as: given the customer and environmental requirements, develop an integrated approach for green product design that results in maximization of the product's total life-cycle value (TLCV). Initially, through investigation in the field of ECDM, we specified a clear ECDM domain within Industrial Ecology. Then, we proposed various state-of-the-art techniques that were used to implement ECDM in the literature. After we defined the IECDM problem, we developed an integrated approach that led to a generic QFD-IECDM methodology for dealing with problems in the ECDM domain. Finally, for implementing the proposed methodology, we developed a tentative IDDS framework to encourage longterm development followed by an example. |
