Tom Buchert

Target-Driven Sustainable Product Development

Figuring in sustainability in product development requires a profound understanding of the cause and effect of engineering decisions along the full spectrum of the product lifecycle and the triple bottomline of sustainability. Sustainability design targets can contribute to mitigating the complexity involved, by means of a formalised problem description. This article discusses how sustainability design targets can be defined and presents methods for systematically implementing these targets into the design process. To that end, different means of decision support mechanisms are presented. They comprise (a) use cases of target breakdowns in subsystems, (b) systematic reduction of solution space and (c) assistance in design activities to ensure achievement of sustainability design targets. This paper explains how interfaces to engineering tools such as Computer Aided Design/Engineering (CAD/CAE) or Product Data/Lifecycle Management (PDM/PLM) can be put in place to make the process of retrieving information and providing decision support more seamless.

Formal system for the expression of target-oriented design heuristics

In design, it is generally neither possible to list all solutions to a given problem nor to prove whether a solution is optimal. In this context, guidance can be provided to designers in the form of heuristics, i.e. solutions validated by practice which have proven to lead towards satisfactory solutions but which are not guaranteed to be optimal or perfect. This article contributes to the development of supportive design tools by providing a first formal system for the expression of target-oriented design heuristics and their collection in consistent sets.