Sustainable Product Design through Non-dominated Sorting Cuckoo Search

Sustainability is an important consideration in product design. The sustainable design should fully consider the environmental, social, and economic factors of the product. However, the three factors are often conflicting with each other. This paper aims to strike a balance between these factors and achieve sustainable product design through multi-objective optimization. The three influencing factors of sustainability, namely, the environmental factor, social factor and economic factor, were respectively defined as environmental impact, labor time and labor cost. Then, the product to be designed was represented as a design structure matrix (DSM), a list of all product components and the dependency patterns among these components. On this basis, the non-dominated sorting and cuckoo search were combined into a multi-objective optimization technique to optimize the product functionality. This technique looks for a set of Pareto optimal solutions, each of which represents the structure of modules and the number of modules. The effectiveness of the proposed technique was verified through a case study on a coffee maker. The results show that our technique outperformed the previous optimization methods. © 2019 Lavoisier. All rights reserved.