ABSTRACT: Sustainability is a central challenge in engineering. Early architectural design decisions strongly influence a product’s ecological footprint and long-term sustainability potential. Addressing these aspects in the concept phase is therefore essential. This paper analyses how architecture decisions - such as modularity, standardisation, redundancy, and updateability - affect ecological sustainability. The qualitative assessment helps practitioners to anticipate environmental impacts and foster sustainability awareness in product architecture development.
Grothe et al. (Thu,) studied this question.