Configurational product life-cycle management (PLM) for sustainability: Embedding carbon-aware decision rules in product design

Industrial firms face a dual challenge: delivering highly customized products while meeting ambitious decarbonisation targets. Although product configurators accelerate variant definition and quoting, sustainability metrics are rarely integrated into configuration logic, leaving life-cycle impacts unaddressed at the point of design choice. This paper asks: How can sustainability objectives be embedded as executable decision logic within product configurators? We introduce integrated configurational PLM, a governance approach that embeds life-cycle carbon metrics directly into configurator rule systems, linking configuration logic, PLM traceability, and module-level LCA data. Empirically, we combine a multi-firm field study with a quasi-experimental digital twin to evaluate how carbon-aware rules influence configuration outcomes. Across 1000 synthetic orders, sustainability-aware rules reduce embodied (A1–A3) emissions by 10–20% and increase module reuse by 15–25%, with a modest increase in processing time (+18%). Monte Carlo analysis indicates that these effects remain robust under realistic LCA uncertainty. The findings demonstrate that configurators can evolve from feasibility tools into multi-criteria decision systems that operationalize carbon-aware design. The paper contributes (i) a mechanism for embedding sustainability into configurator rule logic, (ii) empirical evidence of its impact on variant outcomes, and (iii) design principles for integrating and governing LCA data within PLMenabled configuration environments