Qi, Huihui. Decision making framework for sustainable packaging design using life cycle assessment. Retrieved from https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/T3BR8SMD
DescriptionPackaging industry is one of the largest industries in the world and is also associated with many environmental concerns. To reduce the environmental impacts, sustainable packaging design decision has been one of the top priorities in packaging industries nowadays. One of the commonly used tools measuring and quantifying the environmental impact of a product throughout all life stages is the Life Cycle Assessment. Based on the result from Life Cycle Assessment, decision is supposed to be made for choosing the more sustainable designs from a design population. However, the decision making process is challenging because of the complexity of the problem. The complexity is incurred by the large set and multi-criteria characteristic of result from Life Cycle Assessment, the existence of trade-off of designs between different indicators, and the uncertainty in the environmental impact indicator values. The objective of this dissertation is to aid the decision making process to cope with these challenges, find the more sustainable packaging designs alternatives, based on both deterministic environmental impact indicators values and environmental impact indicator values with uncertainty. To achieve the research objective, to aid the decision making process, a decision making framework is developed, which consist of three research components. Component 1 efficiently finds the non-dominated designs among a large design population using Ranking Based Pareto Filter Algorithm. Component 2 concerns the trade-offs between designs on different indicators, using Design Preference Function and Ranking Based Rate of Substitution Method. Component 3 deals with the uncertainty in the environmental impact indicator values. When dealing with the uncertainty in the environmental impact indicators, the Ranking Based Pareto Selection Algorithm has been modified to the Probabilistic Pareto Filter Algorithm.