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Exploring decision tradeoffs in sustainable design

conference contribution
posted on 2015-08-26, 08:30 authored by Christopher A. Mattson, Vicky LofthouseVicky Lofthouse, Tracy Bhamra
Sustainable design involves three essential areas: economic sustainability, environmental sustainability, and social sustainability. For even the simplest of products, the complexities of these three areas and their tradeoffs cause decision-making transparency to be lost in most practical situations. The existing field of multiobjective optimization offers a natural framework to explore the tradeoffs in the sustainability space (defined by economic, environmental, and social sustainability issues), thus offering both the designer and the decision makers a means of understanding the sustainability tradeoffs. To facilitate this, a decision making approach that capitalizes on the principles and power of multiobjective optimization is presented. This paper concludes that sustainable development can indeed benefit from tradeoff characterization using multiobjecive optimization techniques – even when using only basic models of sustainability. Interestingly, the unique characteristics of the three essential sustainable development areas lead to an alternative view of some traditional multiobjective optimization concepts, such as weak Pareto optimality. The sustainable engineering design of a hypodermic needle is presented as a simple hypothetical example for method demonstration and discussion.

Funding

The authors gratefully recognize the Fulbright Commission and Loughborough Design School for funding this research.

History

School

  • Design

Published in

2015 ASME/DETC Design for Manufacturing and the Life Cycle conference

Citation

MATTSON, C.A., LOFTHOUSE, V.A. and BHAMRA, T.A., 2015. Exploring decision tradeoffs in sustainable design. Proceedings of the ASME 2015 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference, Boston, 2-5 August 2015

Publisher

© ASME

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2015

Notes

This paper is Closed Access because the publisher does not allow us to make it open access.

Language

  • en

Location

Boston

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