A Modular Product Design Method to Improve Product Social Sustainability Performance

Abstract

Sustainability has been the emphasis of intense discussion over recent decades, but mostly focused on addressing critical aspects of environmental issues. An increasing awareness of social responsibilities and ever-shifting customer requirements have led manufacturers to consider social sustainability during the design phase in tandem with addressing environmental concerns; thus, design for social sustainability has evolved as a new product design direction. Modular product design (MPD), has been widely used in both academia and industry because of its significant benefits in design engineering. Because of the potential synergy, investigating design for social sustainability in association with MPD holds promise as a field of investigation. In this paper, we introduce a novel MPD approach that uses the elements of key component specification and product impact on social sustainability. The key components carry core technologies or have the highest sustainability effects in a product (i.e., the most costly or environmentally polluting parts). Product competitiveness strongly relies on a few key components that should be a focal point during product development. However, to the best of our knowledge, key components have not been well addressed in modular product design. In this paper, we employ labor time as an indicator to measure social sustainability. A heuristic-based clustering algorithm with labor time optimization is developed to categorize components into modules. A coffee-maker case study is conducted to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed methodology.

Implementing Social Sustainability for Innovative Industrial Work Environments

“…They emphasize the need for training and the use of tools that ease the work for them. Ma and Okudan Kremer [47] also believe that the only way to evaluate problems related to sustainability is to balance the impact of the environmental, economic, and social dimensions, especially as the human aspects also have impact on economic decisions and improvement. These findings are in line with Boström's discussion of how barriers to knowing what sustainability is make it difficult to operationalize [33].…”

Optimal Product Family Architecture Design and Commonality Decision for Sustainability and Intellectual Property Protection

“…Modules with similar or compatible materials make recycling easier [19]. Besides, if components within a module have a similar residual lifetime [14], it facilitates maintenance, saves time and effort by not requiring further disassembly operations when replacing the module.…”

Optimal Product Family Architecture Design and Commonality Decision for Sustainability and Intellectual Property Protection

“…The identification and specification of suitable product family platforms through modular product design can provide substantial benefits for producers, such as to: increase manufacturing and remanufacturing efficiency and effectiveness, reduce inventory cost, save distribution time, and satisfy the demand for mass customization [12][13][14][15]. While some researchers proposed methodologies to address the simultaneous consideration of new and remanufactured products in product family design [16,17], previous studies of sustainable product family design generally assumed that products within the product family have the same product architecture.…”