Trade-offs between sustainability criteria and engineering design variables can lead to sub-optimisations and costly short-term priorities. This study explores how sustainability requirements can be identified and integrated in product requirements to guide strategic and tactical decisions in product development including sustainability perspectives. Literature review and action research resulted in a proposed systematic approach that: define sustainability criteria and indicators; use correlation analysis with QFD; and adds identified specific sustainability requirements to requirement list.
There are high expectations of additive manufacturing (AM) as a technology to improve manufacturing efficiency and reduce material waste. This study aims to clarify the sustainability advantages and challenges of AM technologies used in industry by testing and applying a strategic sustainability life cycle assessment in the early development stage. The result showed possibilities from using the tool and some areas of certain interest regarding improvement potentials of the AM technologies, i.e. value chain management, concept design, optimized material usage, and social sustainability.
Sustainability has shifted from strategically important to business critical for several manufacturing industries. This paper introduces an implementation framework to increase the capabilities in companies to design, develop and offer sustainable product-and production solutions in line with new regulatory strategies and plans.Based on a questionnaire survey, conducted in ten different product development companies representing different industrial sectors, the status and needs of sustainable product development were captured. Further on, a better understanding of the capabilities for a forthcoming digital sustainable product development support, were identified in an action research-based approach with three industrial companies. This paper presents the rational of a digital sustainable product development support, in relation to global sustainability goals and societal dimensions of sustainability transitions. The main results from the questionnaire presents the challenges and needs of capabilities for product developers and design engineers to develop more sustainable solutions in a resource efficient way. The action-based research with the three industrial manufacturing partners resulted in a set of common key activities and detailed requirements for a digital sustainable product development support. Finally, the paper describes a first prototype of a digital platform, i.e. Digital Sustainability Implementation Package-DSIP, and discusses future work.
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