Quantitative Methods for Sustainable Product Development

Traditional approaches to product development have primarily focused on aspects related to business profits and providing a suitable functionality of products. Sustainable product development involves environmental and social issues, and consequently, business responsibility for selling products. This responsibility can be considered in the context of the product life cycle, including product design, manufacturing, usage, and finally, disposal/recycling. The product development process can be supported by quantitative methods that use data acquired from enterprise databases. Nowadays, a significant number of companies register their business processes in information systems, such as enterprise resource planning, computer-aided design, and customer relationship management. Therefore, data-driven methods can be applied for improving sustainable product development, including reducing the risk of ineffective resource management, product failures, and increasing the chance of developing a successful product.

Many companies are trying to incorporate sustainability into their strategies for managing new products. Today, sustainable product design requires holistic approaches involving the whole product life cycle. These approaches aim to enhance the models, metrics for sustainability evaluation, and optimization methods for the product, process, and system levels. Sustainable product development necessitate assessing sustainability performance in the product life cycle and optimizing the decision-making process. Consequently, there is the need to elaborate upon the quantitative methods for measuring and monitoring sustainability, supporting sustainable manufacturing processes, and managing sustainable product development.

This Special Issue contains six contributions. The Contribution 1 is concerned with developing a method of analyzing solutions to environmental problems that supports decisions regarding improving the quality of products/processes, considering their impacts on the natural environment. The proposed method is called FQE-SD (fuzzy qualitatively environmentally sustainable development), and it integrates the selected tools of qualitative and multi-criteria decision methods.

The Contribution 2 discusses potential areas for enhancing manufacturing operations to reduce environmental damage and facilitate knowledge transfer among the various sectors. Moreover, it provides a strategic footing for advancing sustainable and efficient manufacturing practices within foundation industries.

The Contribution 3 presents the holistic approach that provides a more nuanced understanding of how sustainable practices influence a company’s bottom line and overall market position. Key findings of this research reveal that integrating sustainable product development into business strategies enhances environmental stewardship and impacts financial performance.

The Contribution 4 is concerned with using parametric models to search for opportunities to better product sustainability, and simulations to identify conditions for achieving the sustainability targets of new products. The proposed approach aims to support R&D specialists in identifying possible changes to improve the sustainability of new products.

The Contribution 5 investigates the determinants that impact the decision-making process of sustainable purchasing. The study aims to comprehend the inclination toward environmentally friendly purchases and the elements that promote their behavior, using a structural equation modeling approach with partial least squares analysis.

The Contribution 6 demonstrates how various visualization methods can be employed for analysis, interpretation, and communication, as well as what insights can be derived to optimize the potential environmental impact of the product. It provides multiple visualizations for different goals of the interpretation of product life cycle assessment.