Ecodesign integration in the joint design of product and its supply chain: Agent-based model

The joint design of product and its supply chain becomes a trend in the industrial world that reduces design's costs and delay. In previous works we proposed a distributed architecture, based on autonomous agents, in order to model cooperation activities between product designers and supply chain partners in product development stage. The multi agent system aims to choose a product from a set of product's alternatives, the optimal one according to its supply chain costs. The proposed agents are imbedded with optimization models that minimizes costs and specifies selected nodes and activities assigned to each supply chain partner. Unfortunately, costs are not a decisive criterion, many criteria should be integrated to choose the optimal product design like environmental criteria. In this paper, we present a new model that integrate the environmental constraints in product selection. Consequently, we propose to adopt a multi criteria decision method to reduce the number of product's alternatives proposed by product designers based on environmental criteria, then costs' optimization can be done to select the best product design. The goal is to avoid the huge simulation time that can generate costs' optimization for all proposed product designs and at the same time we select an eco-friendly design with optimal costs.