Multicriteria decision-aid approach for product end-of-life alternative selection

Abstract

The selection of the best compromise alternative for treating a product at its end of life (EOL) is presented. Each EOL alternative has its own consequences from an economical, environmental and social point of view. The criteria used to determine these consequences are often contradictory and not equally important. In the presence of multiple conflicting criteria, an optimal EOL alternative rarely exists. Hence, the decision-maker should seek the best compromise EOL alternative. The present paper proposes a multicriteria decision-aid (MCDA) approach to aid the decision-maker in selecting the best compromise EOL alternative on the basis of his/her preferences and the performances of EOL alternatives with respect to the relevant environmental, social and economic criteria. This approach is important because it allows the user to consider various conflicting criteria simultaneously and it takes into account his/her preferences. The paper analyses the most important aspects of this approach such as the constitution of a set of EOL alternatives, the selection of a list of relevant criteria to evaluate the EOL alternatives and the choice of an appropriate multicriteria decision-aid method. A case study is provided to illustrate how the proposed approach can be used for product EOL alternative selection in real-world applications.

Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge the work done under the AEOLOS project GRD1-1999-11285 by the following participants (listed alphabetically): H. C. Aasen, S. Adda, W. Bruce, K. Goggin, C. Hans, K. Holbø, N. Kalogeropoulou, T. Lamvik, L. Madden, G. S. Miljeteig, O. Myklebust, D. Mulligan, S. Piguet, E. Reay, M. Schnatmeyer, K. Snaddon and A. Thurley; and the associated companies and institutions: SINTEF (Norway), Ecobilan (the UK), BIBA (Germany), CIMRU (Ireland), EPFL (Switzerland), Intracom (Greece), Q-FREE (Norway), Multis (Ireland) and Bird (Switzerland).