A decision-making methodology for low-carbon electronic product design

Degradation of environment can significantly affect human existence and development. Therefore, environmental protection deserves significant attention. Low-carbon products have become an attractive option due to global warming. To efficiently and effectively achieve the aim of eco-friendly electronic product design, this paper develops a decision-making methodology for low-carbon electronic product design. First the proposed methodology estimates the released amounts of greenhouse gases for different product designs throughout the major phases of a product's life cycle. This research can subsequently determine the benchmarking low-carbon design parts (as compared with other competitive products) and discern the causes of the poor carbon footprint (CF) performance. This will stimulate innovation to propose the low-carbon design alternatives. This research creates an evaluation model of low-carbon design alternative combinations in order to assess their performance. A multi-objective genetic algorithm is employed to determine an optimal low-carbon design alternative combination satisfying the CF constraint of a new product and minimizing the design time and cost. Finally, this research utilizes an MP3 player as a case study to showcase the significant efficacy of the proposed methodology. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.