Approximate Life Cycle Assessment of Product Concepts Using a Hybrid Genetic Algorithm and Neural Network Approach
Environmental impact assessment of products has been a key area of research and development for sustainable product development. Many companies copy these trends and they consider environmental criteria into the product design process. Life Cycle Assessme
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Department of Industrial Information and Systems Engineering, Sangmyung University, San 98-20, Anso-Dong, Chonan, Chungnam 330-720, Korea Department of Computer, Information and Telecommunication Engineering, Graduate School, Sangmyung University, 7 Hongji-Dong, Jongno-Gu, Seoul 110-743, Korea {kwangkyu,wkkim}@smu.ac.kr Abstract. Environmental impact assessment of products has been a key area of research and development for sustainable product development. Many companies copy these trends and they consider environmental criteria into the product design process. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is used to support the decision-making for product design and the best alternative can be selected by its estimated environmental impacts and benefits. The need for analytical LCA has resulted in the development of approximate LCA. This paper presents an optimization strategy for approximate LCA using a hybrid approach which incorporate genetic algorithms (GAs) and neural networks (NNs). In this study, GAs are employed to select feature subsets to eliminate irrelevant factors and determine the number of hidden nodes and processing elements. In addition, GAs will optimize the connection weights between layers of NN simultaneously. Experimental results show that a hybrid GA and NN approach outperforms the conventional backpropagation neural network and verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
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Introduction
Environmental impact assessment of products is an important and widely studied issue since it can have significant impact on making a decision for environmentally conscious design and development. Traditionally, manufacturers mainly focus on how to reduce the cost that a company spends for materials acquisition, production, and logistics, but due to widespread awareness of global environment problems and environmental legislative measures, companies also should take environmental considerations into their decision-making process of product development. These trends are driving many companies to consider environmental impacts during product development. Product designers are challenged with questions of what and how to consider environmental issues in relation to the products they are developing. In particular, it is quite relevant to understand how design changes can affect the environmental performance of product concepts in the early design process. M.S. Szczuka et al. (Eds.): ICHIT 2006, LNAI 4413, pp. 258–268, 2007. c Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007
Approximate Life Cycle Assessment of Product Concepts
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Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is now the most sophisticated tools to consider and quantify the consumption of resources and the environmental impacts associated with a product or process [1]. By considering the entire life cycle and the associated environmental burdens, LCA identifies opportunities to improve environmental performance. Conceptually, a detailed LCA is a very useful method, but it may be rather costly, time consuming and sometimes difficult to communicate with non-environmental experts. Furth
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