An integrated AHP and VIKOR approach to evaluating green design alternatives

Green design evaluation has been recognized as one of the most significant phases in new product development as it determines the direction of a new product design in manufacturing industry. However, how to assess design alternatives must be answered by excellent designers according to both advanced design methods and effective evaluation methods. This is difficult because some performance values are subjective and imprecise and often depend on experts' judgments. This paper presents a framework based on the combination of analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and VIsekriterijumsko KOmpromisno Rangiranje (VIKOR) to evaluate design alternatives based on green indices in a subjective environment. A novel AHP is presented to determine the weight of each evaluation criterion. VIKOR is used to acquire the final rank of design alternatives. A case study is conducted to verify the performance of the proposed method. The result shows that the proposed multi-criterion decision-making approach can enhance the objectivity in the evaluation of design alternatives greatly.