Abstract:

Green design involves many aspects, such as material selection, process planning, structure optimization, recycling and so on. For designers, how to quickly extract parts which have greater potential for optimization in environmental performances, and further unify the process of design improvements in a number of parts of similar environmental characteristics has become a key issue to improve the efficiency of green design. Considering fuzziness of the potential for environmental optimization in product parts, fuzzy evaluation and fuzzy sets have been applied to establish an optimization set of green design. Then fuzzy clustering method has been used to study the internal relations among the parts in the set to extract a subset of parts with similar potential in environmental aspects. Therefore, the designers can develop green design optimization uniformly, which can effectively shorten the green product development cycles, improve the success rate of product green design. Finally, a type of dishwasher is used as a study case to verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the method.

Key words: design efficiency, environmental performances, fuzzy theory, optimization potential, green design