William Z. Bernstein

Integrated Sustainable Life Cycle Design: A Review

Product design is one of the most important sectors influencing global sustainability, as almost all the products consumed by people are outputs of the product development process. In particular, early design decisions can have a very significant impact on sustainability. These decisions not only relate to material and manufacturing choices but have a far-reaching effect on the product’s entire life cycle, including transportation, distribution, and end-of-life logistics. However, key challenges have to be overcome to enable eco-design methods to be applicable in early design stages. Lack of information models, semantic interoperability, methods to influence eco-design thinking in early stages, measurement science and uncertainty models in eco-decisions, and ability to balance business decisions and eco-design methodology are serious impediments to realizing sustainable products and services. Therefore, integrating downstream life cycle data into eco-design tools is essential to achieving true sustainable product development. Our review gives an overview of related research and positions early eco-design tools and decision support as a key strategy for the future. By merging sustainable thinking into traditional design methods, this review provides a framework for ongoing research, as well as encourages research collaborations among the various communities interested in sustainable product realization.

Integration of Sustainability Into Early Design Through the Function Impact Matrix

The issue of environmental sustainability, which is unprecedented in both magnitude and complexity, presents one of the biggest challenges faced by modern society. Design engineers can make significant contributions by incorporating environmental awareness into product and process development. It is critical that engineers make a paradigm shift in product design from centering on cost and performance to balancing economic, environmental, and societal considerations. Although there have been quite a few designs for environment (or ecodesign) tools developed, so far, these tools have only achieved limited industrial penetration. The present-day methods are either too qualitative to offer concrete solutions and not effective for designers with limited experience or too quantitative, costly, and time consuming. Thus, current ecodesign tools cannot be implemented during the early design phases. This paper develops a novel, semiquantitative ecodesign methodology that is targeted specifically toward the early stages of the design process. The new methodology is a combination of environmental life cycle assessment and visual tools such as quality function deployment, functional-component matrix, and Pugh chart. Since the early design process is function-oriented, a new visual tool called the function impact matrix has been developed to correlate environmental impacts with product function. Redesign of office staplers for reduced carbon footprint has been selected as a case study to demonstrate the use of the proposed approach. Life cycle assessment results confirm that the new stapler design generated using this methodology promotes improved environmental performance.

Function Impact Matrix for Sustainable Concept Generation: A Designer’s Perspective

Reducing the environmental effects of products has become a significant focus of corporate strategies. As a result, easy-to-use ecodesign tools that can be implemented during the early design stage are essential for corporations to gain a competitive advantage in product development. A novel eco-design method, the function impact matrix (FIM), is being developed as a tool to enable the development and evaluation of design concepts by correlating environmental impacts with product functions. This paper aims to illustrate the efficacy and relative ease of use of the FIM. Understanding designers’ interactions with visual tools and cognitive load analysis of designers can provide new insight that aids in the development of easy-to-use ecodesign tools. In this pilot study, design engineers with varying levels of experience and self-perceived eco-design knowledge are asked to redesign an alarm clock under four different design scenarios: 1) using no eco-design tools, 2) using the LiDS wheel and an ecodesign checklist, 3) raw life cycle assessment (LCA) data and 4) the function impact matrix. Surveying the designers reveals that the function impact method carried the highest overall rank compared to the other ecodesign tools with regard to ease of use, quality of data, ability for identifying redesign opportunities, and overall effectiveness. As suggested by the designers, a combination of a modified LiDS wheel with the FIM would lead to a helpful tool for sustainable concept generation.© 2010 ASME

Prioritizing Design for Environment Strategies Using a Stochastic Analytic Hierarchy Process

This paper describes a framework for applying design for environment (DfE) within an industry setting. Our aim is to couple implicit design knowledge such as redesign/process constraints with quantitative measures of environmental performance to enable informed decision making. We do so by integrating life cycle assessment (LCA) and multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA). Specifically, the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) is used for prioritizing various levels of DfE strategies. The AHP network is formulated so as to improve the environmental performance of a product while considering business-related performance. Moreover, in a realistic industry setting, the onus of decision making often rests with a group, rather than an individual decision maker (DM). While conducting independent evaluations, experts often do not perfectly agree and no individual expert can be considered representative of the ground truth. Hence, we integrate a stochastic simulation module within the MCDA for assessing the variability in preferences among DMs. This variability in judgments is used as a metric for quantifying judgment reliability. A sensitivity analysis is also incorporated to explore the dependence of decisions on specific input preferences. Finally, the paper discusses the results of applying the proposed framework in a real-world case. [DOI: 10.1115/1.4025701]

Addressing Uncertainties Within Product Redesign for Sustainability: A Function Based Framework

The Function Impact Method (FIM) is a semiquantitative eco-design methodology that is targeted specifically towards the early stages of the design process. The FIM allows a designer to predict the environmental impacts associated with a new functional embodiment by extrapolating knowledge from Life cycle assessment (LCA) of similar existing designs. LCA however, is associated with substantial sources of uncertainty. Furthermore, the FIM uses a subjective weighting scheme for representing function-structure affinities. In the authors’ previous work, a Monte-Carlo variation analysis was used to estimate sensitivity of the input data and estimating the preferred redesign strategy. This paper proposes a method to formalize the input uncertainties in the FIM by modeling the uncertainties present in the results of the LCA’s and the involved function-structure affinities using Info-gap decision theory. The desirability of redesigning a particular function based on the magnitude of its functionconnectivity and eco-impact is estimated, and a decision making methodology based on robust satisficing is discussed. This method is applied for making robust redesign decisions with regards to re-designing a pneumatic impact wrench for sustainability.

Mutually Coordinated Visualization of Product and Supply Chain Metadata for Sustainable Design

In this paper, we present a novel visualization framework for product and supply chain metadata in the context of redesign-related decision scenarios. Our framework is based on the idea of overlaying product-related metadata onto interactive graph representations of a supply chain and its associated product architecture. By coupling environmental data with graph-based visualizations of product architecture, our framework provides a novel decision platform for expert designers. Here, the user can balance the advantages of a redesign opportunity and manage the associated risk on the product and supply chain. For demonstration, we present ViSER, an interactive visualization tool that provides an interface consisting of different mutually coordinated views providing multiple perspectives on a particular supply chain presentation. To explore the utility of ViSER, we conduct a domain expert exploration using a case study of peripheral computer equipment. Results indicate that ViSER enables new affordances within the decision making process for supply chain redesign.

TOWARDS KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT FOR SMART MANUFACTURING

The need for capturing knowledge in the digital form in design, process planning, production, and inspection has increasingly become an issue in manufacturing industries as the variety and complexity of product lifecycle applications increase. Both knowledge and data need to be well managed for quality assurance, lifecycle-impact assessment, and design improvement. Some technical barriers exist today that inhibit industry from fully utilizing design, planning, processing, and inspection knowledge. The primary barrier is a lack of a well-accepted mechanism that enables users to integrate data and knowledge. This paper prescribes knowledge management to address a lack of mechanisms for integrating, sharing, and updating domain-specific knowledge in smart manufacturing. Aspects of the knowledge constructs include conceptual design, detailed design, process planning, material property, production, and inspection. The main contribution of this paper is to provide a methodology on what knowledge manufacturing organizations access, update, and archive in the context of smart manufacturing. The case study in this paper provides some example knowledge objects to enable smart manufacturing.

An Open Web-Based Repository for Capturing Manufacturing Process Information

With recent progress in developing more effective models for representing manufacturing processes, this paper presents an approach towards an open web-based repository for storing manufacturing process information. The repository is envisioned to include several new use cases in the context of information use in smart manufacturing. This paper examines several key benefits through usage scenarios engaging existing engineering activities. Based on the scenarios, the desired characteristics of an open web-based repository are presented, namely that it will be (1) complementary to existing practices, (2) open and net centric, (3) able to enforce model consistency, (4) modular (5) extensible, and (5) able to govern contributions. A repository will support and motivate the ubiquitous and extended use of standardized representations of unit manufacturing processes in order to promote consistency of performance assessments across industries and provide a tangible, data-driven perspective for analysis-related activities. Furthermore, the paper presents additional benefits and possible applications that could result from a shared manufacturing repository.

A Framework for Visualization-Driven Eco-Conscious Design Exploration

A large portion of design activity involves applying previous design knowledge in order to solve new problems. Therefore, facilitating eco-conscious exploration of archived designs is needed for advancing sustainable product design. It is thus necessary to create integrated exploration tools that share common data representations for design and sustainability-related product metadata. This can allow designers to observe covariations in design data and develop engineering intuition with regards to environmental sustainability performance. In this work, we present a framework for relating sustainability and product metadata using taxonomy-based representations of lifecycle data. This facilitates simultaneous visualization of environmental indicators along with part similarities. To demonstrate this framework, we implement shapeSIFT, an interactive multidimensional visualization tool for eco-conscious design exploration. shapeSIFT uses a visual analytics-based approach to represent part metadata and environmental indicators. This facilitates query-based dynamic exploration of part repositories.

A system and architecture for reusable abstractions of manufacturing processes

In this paper we report on the development of a system for managing a repository and conducting analysis and optimization on manufacturing performance models. The repository is designed to contain (1) unit manufacturing process performance models, (2) composite performance models representing production cells, lines, and facilities, (3) domain specific analytical views, and (4) ontologies and taxonomies. Initial implementation includes performance models for milling and drilling as well as a composite performance model for machining. These performance models formally capture (1) the metrics of energy consumption, CO2 emissions, tool wear, and cost as a function of process controls and parameters, and (2) the process feasibility constraints. The initial scope of the system includes (1) an Integrated Development Environment and its interface, and (2) simulation and deterministic optimization of performance models through the use of Unity Decision Guidance Management System.