Multi-Criteria Decision Making for Sustainability and Value Assessment in Early PSS Design

Multi-Criteria Decision Making for Sustainability and Value Assessment in Early PSS Design

Sustainability is a key innovation capability in the organization, yet it is difficult to “mix and match” sustainability targets with more traditional objectives—such as quality, time, cost, and performances—when designing and developing new products.

Our latest paper titled “Multi-Criteria Decision Making for Sustainability and Value Assessment in Early PSS Design” proposes a model to guide the engineering team in identifying the ‘best design concept’ (the one to be preferred and to be selected for detailed design) from a sustainability and value perspective. 

Are you interested in trying the model? You can download our free demo (in MS Excel) at this link: https://1drv.ms/x/s!Agg_P0BR6jvriWrKSWU3Cl5ZakOj 

The demo is limited to 3 solutions and 19 value criteria. If you are interested in trying the full approach (where you can benchmark a theoretical unlimited number of solutions using a more detailed and customized list of criteria), please contact marco.bertoni@bth.se.

ABSTRACT

Sustainability is increasingly recognized as a key innovation capability in the organization. However, it is not always evident for manufacturers how sustainability targets shall be “mixed and matched” with more traditional objectives—such as quality, time, cost, and performances—when designing and developing solutions. The emergence of “servitization” and product-service systems (PSS) further emphasizes the need for making thoughtful trade-offs between technical aspects, business strategies, and environmental benefits of a design. The objective of this paper is to investigate how multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) models shall be applied to down-select PSS concepts from a value perspective, by considering sustainability as one of the attributes of a design contributing to the overall value of a solution. Emerging from the findings of a multiple case study in the aerospace and construction sector, the paper presents a five-step iterative process to support decision making for sustainable PSS design, which was further applied to design an electrical load carrier. The findings show that the proposed approach creates a “hub” where argumentations related to “value” and “sustainability” of PSS solution concepts can be systematically captured in a way that supports the discussion on the appropriate quantification strategy.

KEYWORDS

product-service systems, circular economy, concept design, multi-criteria decision making, sustainability

CITATION

Bertoni M. (2019) Multi-criteria decision making for sustainability and value assessment in early PSS design. Sustainability 2019, 11(7), 1952; https://doi.org/10.3390/su11071952.

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DIVA: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:bth-17757

MDPI Journal: View Full-Text

Categories: Publications, Research

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