Design for environment: An environmental analysis model for the modular design of products

Due to the internal and external pressure, more and more manufacturing enterprises are working to improve the environmental performance of their products. Pollution may be generated at all stages through the whole life cycle of a product. Taking potential environmental impacts of a product into account as early as at its design stage, Design for Environment (DFE) can be used to maximally improve the environmental performance of a product. Modular design is a widely used design method for electromechanical products. While traditional modularity analysis pays little attention to the environmental factors, this research aims at including the environmental criteria into the modularity analysis, and developing a DFE design supporting system for the modular design. This paper proposed a quantitative environmental analysis methodology for the modular design. Considering all stages through the life cycle of a product, some primary environmental objectives are analyzed and selected as the criteria for the modularity analysis, all environmental criteria are ranked using the Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (FAHP). In order to get a comprehensive effect of all environmental criteria, fuzzy numbers are used to combine some uncertain judgments of decision makers with crisp numbers. In this paper, the modularity analysis is done under the restriction of the function-structure mapping, and it includes the similarity and independence analysis.