Product sustainable design for carbon footprint during product life cycle

Abstract

Product low carbon design plays a significant part in reducing carbon emissions during the product life cycle and achieving sustainable development. Aiming at the uncertainty of the carbon footprint caused by the unknown decision of product material solution, this paper proposes a low carbon design approach that uses the multigraph and colour marking to solve the problem of one edge assigned with multiple weights and the constraint problem of vertex combination in the decision space of product low carbon design. After a weighted edge-coloured graph (WECG) is proposed for low carbon design, the multi-stage product low carbon design model for product life cycle is discussed in detail. An algorithm of searching the alternative set of optimal design is also put forward in detail, including to create the directed WECG, to define the complete path, to find the ideal solution set using breadth-first search, to judge the ideal solution set by colouring the graph to obtain the feasible paths, and to rank paths in the ideal solution set in ascending order. The low carbon design of a robot is given as an example to demonstrate the methodology.