A sustainability approach to vehicle modular platform design: A mathematical model

Abstract

Today, sustainability and its economic, social, and environmental pillars are the main elements of new product market development. Therefore, manufacturers, considering all stages of a product life-cycle, consider it necessary to have a framework for producing sustainable products. Moreover, new product design and development processes especially sub-process of product definition and detailed design processes can play a very critical role in developing product sustainability. This paper considers the role that the car platform can play in creating a family of products and with regard to various data related to the environmental, economic, and social pillars of each of the 15 modules of a car platform and also, using the best–worst method technique and multi-objective mathematical programming with the augmented epsilon constraint method, we were able to achieve a set of platforms with maximum sustainability. The present study explores the possibility of determining the most efficient combinations of modules for every one of the 23 cars’ platforms to produce a collection of products. Through these methods, the 54 efficient solutions in the Pareto front were achieved, and out of this number, after considering all the factors and weights of the objective functions, solution no. 51 was selected as the most efficient. Subsequently, all the 15 module variants of the 23 platforms were determined for solution no. 51. Finally, these variants were ranked on the basis of the SAW technique, and finally, sensitivity analysis is done.