Systematic Lifecycle Design for Sustainable Product Development

Abstract

Sustainable product development (SPD) requires that product designs achieve minimal or zero environmental impacts, in addition to satisfying the traditional design criteria, such as product functionality, quality, features, costs, and time to market. Environmental evaluations must, therefore, be incorporated into the design stage. In this research, a product design process model is proposed that includes three design requirements, two design tasks, and three comprehensive assessment streams. The functional requirement is derived from the customers' needs, reflecting the product's functional purpose; the environmental requirement reflects society's need for protecting natural resources and the environment; and, the economic requirement ensures the company's basic business goals. Accordingly, SPD aims to simultaneously carry out the two tasks of designing products' physical and lifecycle structures. In the assessment phase of product design, three assessment streams, including lifecycle quality (LCQ) analysis, lifecycle assessment (LCA) and lifecycle cost (LCC), are conducted with respect to the functional, environmental, and economic evaluations. A process-based analysis concept is proposed for the analysis of LCQ, LCA, and LCC evaluations. A simplified LCA is used for the environmental evaluations. Detailed assessment techniques are also developed for effective design evaluations. A case study example is provided to illustrate the methods and models.

A decision-making methodology for low-carbon electronic product design

“…Sharma and Manepatil [33] applied LCA to analyze the environmental impacts of the parts of a bicycle; the results allowed designers to understand the Design for Environment (DfE) level. Lu et al [25] used a 0-5 rating system to perform an LCA in order to comprehend the environmental impacts of the major parts of a coating machine throughout the product's life cycle. However, these methods only provide rough LCA information, which cannot be employed to analyze the reasons for the strong environmental impacts.…”

The project management model that incorporates the spatial sustainability within the design process of small satellites

“…So, in order to incorporate sustainable development in the product lifecycle, it is necessary that the designers not only design the physical structure of the product, but also the structure of its lifecycle. While traditional product design focuses on product functionality, quality and cost to meet customer requirements, sustainable product development (SPD) systematically integrates the functional, environmental and economic requirements [3,4]. Those requirements aim to:…”

“…These approaches make possible to define the guidelines and improve the design, establishing techniques that incorporate the customer's needs in the analysis, requirements and specifications of the defined product. Therefore, management processes and the design of the life cycle are essentials to incorporate efficient ways to define the main causes of environmental impact caused [4]. To achieve this, it is necessary to incorporate into the design process, the SPD and develop simultaneously, the life cycle and the design of the satellite platform (Fig.…”

Integrating Sustainability in Product Requirements

“…Less frequent approaches involved Preference Set-Based Design and Case-based reasoning, e.g. in Inoue et al (2012), (Life cycle-) costing (Grote et al, 2007;Lu et al, 2011;Chan et al, 2014), and separate sustainability compliance requirements (Peças et al, 2013;Heintz et al, 2014;Ma and Okudan Kremer, 2014;Broeren et al, 2016). These efforts will not be assessed in more detail due to their low representation within the search results.…”