An Integrated Approach to Sustainable Product Development at the System Design Stage

Abstract

This paper presents an integrated approach to reducing the environmental impact of product development at the system design stage, by a simultaneous consideration of product design, manufacturing, and the supply chain. The approach incorporates a number of factors that ecologically influence the product lifecycle activities into product architecture design. CAD-based functions are developed to systematically generate manufacturing bills of material (BOM) by varying these factors. Lifecycle assessment is applied to evaluate the environmental impact of the generated BOM’s. Optimization schemes guide the variation process to search for optimal results. This work realizes computer-aided sustainable product development by offering a system design tool of ecological decision making.