Engineering sustainable products requires anticipating life cycle data along entire value chains. Environmental impacts are commonly assessed retrospectively using Life Cycle Assessment. Early assessment during engineering is essential. Therefore, essential elements of product models, artefacts in engineering iterations and relationships for assessing environmental impacts must be integrated into a unified metadata model. The model is developed in seven steps following the Methontology approach: identifying relevant use cases, the necessary details and the purpose of the model through workshops with IT and application partners (1), collecting metadata models through literature review (2), analyzing relevant elements (3), developing a viable model based on constituents from literature (4), implementation in a knowledge graph (5) application to automotive supplier parts (6) and validation in workshops (7). The model supports engineers in decision-making providing relevant information.
Graessler et al. (Thu,) studied this question.