Generation and Evaluation of Product Life Cycle Scenarios in Conceptual Design

Research and experience show that decisions in the early stages of the whole product life cycle, which means conceptual decision of a product’s Life Cycle Scenario (LCS), play an important role in the Life Cycle Cost (LCC), performance, reliability, and environmental impact. This paper describes how to generate and evaluate product life cycle scenarios. The Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP) method is employed because it has the ability to structure complex and multi-attribute problem hierarchically and can deal with the problem of inconsistency in decision-making during pairwise comparison and weighting. First product life cycle scenarios are generated by combination of different life cycle attributes. Then the hierarchy structure of AHP is formulated and essential criteria for evaluating life cycle scenarios are identified. After that pairwise comparison matrices with each criterion and sub-criteria are generated and weights for each criterion are determined. Finally the preferred solution can be selected after comprehensive evaluation. An example demonstrates the application of this methodology. Index Terms : Life Cycle Scenario; AHP; Conceptual Design