Hsin Rau

With the increasing importance of green design in the business landscape, designers are compelled to shift towards eco-design practices. However, existing methodologies face challenges related to resource requirements, abstract concepts, and industry specificity. To address these challenges and stimulate innovation, this study proposes a green design methodology that integrates TRIZ concepts and is anchored in TRIZ evolutionary trends. The methodology includes function and attribute analysis, the introduction of green features, the identification of TRIZ trends through a two-stage process, and the use of a developed system to improve calculation efficiency. Detailed design solutions are generated by combining green features, TRIZ trends, and inventive principles. A case study validates the methodology, showcasing its value in promoting sustainable development. By leveraging the evolutionary potential of products and incorporating TRIZ, the methodology offers a promising approach to address sustainability challenges and drive innovation. This research serves as a starting point for a practical and efficient design methodology that utilizes TRIZ concepts and a computer-aided application tool. Future steps involve stress-testing the methodology and exploring its application in different domains.

The frozen food industry faces growing pressure for sustainability, requiring significant reductions in energy consumption and environmental impact. A critical, yet often overlooked, challenge is the temperature differential between production equipment and the environment, which causes energy inefficiencies, material losses, and quality degradation. Despite its significant influence on production performance and environmental burden, this issue has received limited attention in existing studies. To address this gap, this study aims to develop a systematic innovation framework that integrates the TRIZ-based system interaction analysis, a knowledge base of patented and expert-derived solutions, and Quality Function Deployment to identify root causes and design effective circular strategies. The proposed framework is applied to a frozen fish processing case study, where analysis reveals temperature variation as the dominant bottleneck. The strategy embeds dynamic, microscale adaptability into freezing equipment, which reduces the environmental impact of temperature fluctuations, improves energy efficiency, and cuts material waste. These results demonstrate the feasibility, scalability, and innovation potential of the approach, offering a structured methodology for advancing circularity, resilience, and eco-efficiency in frozen food processing systems.

Palm oil production generates substantial underutilized biomass wastes, including empty fruit bunches, fiber, palm kernel shells, and palm oil mill effluent (POME). Waste-to-energy systems offer a viable pathway to convert these residues into electricity and fertilizer, supporting circular economy goals and sustainability targets. This study takes an example of palm oil waste from the Indragiri Hulu region in Riau Province in Indonesia. It develops a multi-objective optimization framework to evaluate palm oil mill WtE systems from economic, environmental, and energy output. Three scenarios are analyzed: maximal profit (MP), maximal profit with carbon tax (MPCT), and all waste processing (AWP). The MP scenario favors high-return technologies such as gasification and incineration, leading to significant greenhouse gas emissions. The MPCT scenario favors lower-emission technologies like composting and excludes high-emission, low-profit options such as POME digestion. In contrast, the AWP scenario mandates the processing of all wastes, leading to the lowest profits and the highest emissions among all scenarios. The sensitivity analysis reveals that POME processing is not feasible when electricity prices are below the government-set rate, but becomes viable once prices exceed this threshold. These findings offer valuable insights for companies and policymakers seeking to develop and implement effective strategies for optimal waste utilization.

Nowadays, smart and environmentally friendly products are gaining traction in consumers’ purchase intentions. Not only will it reduce the adverse impact on the environment, but it also provides convenience and efficiency due to the improved functionality. On the other hand, companies need to evaluate how to effectively integrate these features into their design process. Therefore, this research aims to provide a systematic design methodology utilizing an axiomatic design approach that will incorporate the exploration of circular design and smart design aspects. To achieve this, a literature review was conducted to identify the specific circular and smart design aspects that will serve as input for the design process. Then, customer preferences on the existing products were collected and mapped into the design aspects. The output of which will be translated into the product’s functional requirements, and finally, overall design alternatives. To assess the effectiveness of the proposed methodology, a case study for a water dispenser was presented. Results show that developed design was better than the existing models available in the market. With that, the proposed product innovation process can be used in practical application and can be used as a solution to increase customer satisfaction and offer companies a competitive advantage.

2020 pandemic situation has pushed many organizations to think and act in order to survive. Resilient and sustainable supplier selection (RSSS) is important for companies facing this situation but there were few studies about this topic. This study tried to give basis for RSSS research by conducting descriptive study about criteria and methods that have been used by many researchers from 2014-2020. The results of this study can be useful for both researchers and practitioners by giving them basis for further development of their RSSS. This study used four step methods of systematic process in literature study, they are identification, screening, determining the eligibility of data, and summation process. RSSS criteria were grouped into general criteria, sustainable criteria and resilient criteria. The criteria were classified into the cost/price, quality, delivery, responsiveness and flexibility, environment, technology, total cost of ownership (TCO) and business metrics (for general criteria), economic, social and environmental (for sustainability criteria), redundancy, flexibility, information sharing, trust, visibility, velocity, leadership, innovation (for resilient criteria). The results showed the lack of development in TCO criteria and the growing interest of developing leadership, information sharing and innovation criteria in the 2020 articles. The methods used mostly were Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) method with integration of order allocation using mathematical modelling.

In order to increase their competitiveness, companies need to have five important capabilities in the product development process, namely, the ability to identify important customer and environmental requirements, convert them into technical requirements, create innovative designs, and determine the best improvement alternatives. Based on a literature survey, previous studies are still inadequate in incorporating these five important capabilities simultaneously and effectively. This study proposes an enhanced model using the Kano model, Quality Function Deployment for Environment (QFDE), and the theory of inventive problem solving (TRIZ), with a component-based approach for systematically designing sustainable and innovative products. An example of a desk lamp design improvement is used to demonstrate the proposed model. After identifying customer and environmental requirements, they are specifically characterized and transformed into a detailed design target using a combination of the Kano model and the improved QFDE method. A thorough evaluation method is developed to determine the most prominent TRIZ solutions. This enhanced model is accomplished at the component level. The results show that the proposed model is capable of incorporating the five important capabilities while reducing process complexity, which greatly assists designers in generating sustainable and innovative designs with minimal dependence on designers’ subjectivity.

The number of consumers with green awareness have grown these days and as a result they have turned to purchase eco-friendly products. For this reason, this study aims to propose a method for eco-design based on the anticipatory failure determination method to develop eco-design products. By using eco-design concepts adopted from the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, the process will limit the failures and issues related to environmental impact in product design. The proposed method for eco-design product in this study follows the following procedure. First, we analyze product failure. Second, we propose the determination of the non-green phenomenon of the failure. Thirdly, we integrate the intensified non-green phenomenon to generate non-green hypotheses and fourthly, we eliminate each non-green phenomenon hypothesis by introducing the contradiction matrix of TRIZ for obtaining solutions. Finally, we assess alternative eco-design solutions by evaluation. To verify the practicality of the new procedure, a washing machine is used as an example for illustration.