Introducing Sustainability in Value Models to Support Design Decision Making: A Systematic Review

Abstract

Abstract:Manufacturing organizations shall recognize sustainability as a business occasion to capitalize on, rather than an undesirable pressing situation. Still, empirical evidence shows that this opportunity is hard to capture and communicate in global strategic decisions, through planning by tactical management, to daily operational activities. This paper systematically reviews the modeling challenges at the crossroad of value and sustainability decisions making, spotlighting methods and tools proposed in literature to link sustainability to customer value creation at strategic, tactical and operational level. While statistical results show that the topic of sustainability and value modeling is trending in literature, findings from content analysis reveal that recent attempts to promote a value-based view in the sustainability discussion remain at a strategic level, with most of the proposed indicators being suited for managerial decision-making. The lack of support at operational level points to the opportunity of cross-pollinating sustainability research with value-centered methodologies originating from the aerospace sector. The Value Driven Design framework is proposed as main hub from which to derive models supporting engineers and technology developers in the identification of win-win-win situations, where sustainable improvements are aligned with business advantages.

Integrating Sustainability in Product Requirements

“…In line with previous research, e.g., Bertoni (2017), the literature review concludes that tools on the operational level have most room for improvements. For example, tools for requirements generation lack a full sustainability perspective and have a tendency to lack a strategic process for defining suitable sustainability criteria and indicators to be integrated in the requirement list.…”

“…This awareness could have an impact on, e.g., the weighting of requirements and or criteria in decision making tools. This is an element that was delimited from this study, and that could add to previous research on how sustainability aspects can be quantified, modelled and integrated into traditional value models for decision making, e.g., Hallstedt et al (2015), Bertoni (2017) and Jaghbeer et al (2017). The literature review results also contained a range of different efforts that apply Theory of Inventive Solving (TRIZ) or Algorithm of Inventive Solving (ARIZ) to support concept generation in the complex decision situation (Kobayashi, 2006;Rathod et al, 2011), Fuzzy logic to handle the uncertainty of variables (Bereketli and Erol Genevois, 2013) and Multicriteria Decision Making to support ranking between design concepts or requirements (Vinodh et al, 2014;Romli et al, 2016;Salari et al, 2016).…”

“…In the light of the perceived gap described above, and as sustainability criteria tend to be traded off in favor for traditional design variables (Bertoni, 2017), this study aims to explore i) how research up until now has approached integration of sustainability criteria in product requirements, and ii) how certain sustainability criteria were selected. The research questions are the following; What methods are being applied to facilitate integration of sustainability aspects into product requirements?…”

“…Although these approaches provide strategic guidance to select relevant sustainability criteria and indicators on strategic and tactical levels, they do not address how the criteria and indicators should be identified and integrated into product requirements on the operational level. In Bertoni (2017), operational decision level support is defined as tools to be used in the design environment for decision making, concept generation and down-selection between concepts, requirements and technologies. Tactical decision level support involves e.g.…”

Multi-Criteria Decision Making for Sustainability and Value Assessment in Early PSS Design

“…In order to ensure the "systematic" nature of the review, the search string was iteratively designed to render a rather broad list of publications, from several different fields, taking care at the same time to mitigate "noise" in the search. Initial iterations of the string only featured the keywords "value" and "sustainability"-similarly to that described in [56]-rendering approximatively 28,000 items in SCOPUS. Additional terms were progressively added to filter out contributions not related to the main topic of the study.…”