Abstract
Many countries have enforced various environmental protection directives to respond to the recent awareness of sustainable development. The goal is to reduce the environmental impacts induced by the products imported to those countries. An effective means is to consider the impacts of the subsequent lifecycle activities at early design stages. This applies the concept of concurrent engineering to sustainable product development. Our past study proposed a concurrent approach to sustainable product design by varying the product architecture to reduce carbon footprint generated during the product lifecycle. Focusing on product planning, this work develops a quantitative decision making tool that minimizes the product development costs considering a given environmental constraint. The tool determines an optimal product portfolio by varying component selection, material, assembly sequence, and supplier selection with computer aided design technologies. The manufacturing BOM for each product is specified in the portfolio. Tabu Search is used to generate an optimal assembly plan. Genetic Algorithm is applied to optimally assign manufacturing tasks to suppliers, who involve different fixed development costs and transportation costs. In addition, component clustering is conducted to facilitate product modularization for reducing environmental impacts. This research adopts a cradle to gate approach in lifecycle assessment based on local lifecycle inventory data. The proposed methods help make ecological decisions at the product planning stage.