5. Fuzzy AHP Approach for Analysing Risk Rating of Environmentally Friendly Product Designs

This chapter presents a model that integrates fuzzy logic and analytic hierarchy process (AHP) for the selection of green product designs. Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a methodology commonly utilised to analyse the environmental impacts of a product from its origin (i.e. raw materials) to its end-of-life. LCA is a popular and comprehensive tool to accomplish the objective. Please refer to Appendix 1 for an introduction of LCA. Two common critiques of LCA lie in its non-consideration of “uncertainty” when evaluating alternative designs and its time-consuming data collection process as well as in its subsequent analysis. The former limitation is particularly important in the design stage as the final options are not well defined, whereas the latter requires substantial resources and expertise. This chapter proposes an approach that blends structured LCA with fuzzy AHP (FAHP). In doing so, some of the disadvantages of LCA can be remedied, and this provides a practical tool for performing LCA. The result is a tool that is easy to use by practitioners to obtain valuable information for evaluating various product designs and particularly useful in the early stages of design when different options can be evaluated and be screened out.