A computational simulation-based framework for estimating potential product impact during product design

Abstract

The impact of engineered products is a topic of concern in society. Product impact may fall under the categories of economic, environmental or social impact, with the last category defined as the effect of a product on the day-to-day life of people. Design teams lack sufficient tools to estimate the social impact of products, and the combined impacts of economic, environmental and social impacts for the products they are designing. This paper aims to provide a framework for the estimation of product impact during product design. To estimate product impact, models of both the product and society are required. This framework integrates models of the product, scenario, society and impact into an agent-based model to estimate product impact. Although this paper demonstrates the framework using only social impact, the framework can also be applied to economic or environmental impacts individually or all three concurrently. Agent-based modelling has been used previously for product adoption models, but it has not been extended to estimate product impact. Having tools for impact estimation allows for optimising the product design parameters to increase the potential positive impact and reduce potential negative impact.

Advancing Sustainable Development: Emerging Factors and Futures for the Engineering Field

“…Scholars have characterized eleven categories of social impacts, e.g., population change, gender, and human rights [98], but standardized metrics for these categories remain lacking. Within product development, scholars have proposed social performance indicators related to employment, health, and standard of living, among others [99,100], and there have been recent advancements in the modeling and prediction of social impacts of engineered solutions [101,102]. However, ample opportunity remains to advance and operationalize socially driven engineering impacts and goals.…”

An approach for including social impact measures in systems design exploration

“…Modeling and simulation have been used to analyze many different types of 6/34 complex systems such as urban electric bus systems (Göhlich et al 2018). Two frameworks often used to model socio-technical systems and their performance over a desired time period are agent-based modeling (ABM) and DES (Tako & Robinson 2010;Mabey et al 2021).…”

“…Data are generated as agents interact. ABM has been used to model electric vehicle transportation networks (Willey & Salmon 2021), military use of small, unmanned air vehicles (Christensen and Salmon 2022), persistent search and retrieval using multiple unmanned air vehicles (Day & Salmon 2021), and to estimate product impacts during the product development process (Mabey et al 2021).…”