A Product and Process Selection Model with Multidisciplinary Environmental Considerations

Introduction of product designs and process innovation requires a company to evaluate complex cost and environmental tradeoffs. In the past, these have not included environmental costs. This paper describes the first known analytical approach to capture comprehensively measurable corporate environmental impact considerations for the product life cycle. A mixed integer programming model is developed to select product and process alternatives while considering tradeoffs of yield, reliability, and business-focused environmental impacts. Explicit constraints for environmental impacts such as material consumption, energy consumption, and process waste generation are modeled for specified assembly and disassembly periods. The constraint sets demonstrate a new way to define the relationship between disassembly configurations and assembly activities through take-back rates. Use of the model as an industry decision tool is demonstrated with an electronics assembly case study.