Research on evaluation methodologies of product life cycle engineering design (LCED) and development of its tools

Life-cycle engineering design (LCED) is expected to represent an important part of the design of manufacturing processes in the future, particularly as a means of minimising environmental impact. In most current life cycle assessment tools (LCAT), the sets of data and information within the numerous tools deployed at various stages of design process are not being properly exchanged among the tools, resulting in a lack of exchange of information available to the different actors along the entire value chain and thus leading to the ineffective and inefficient adoption of sustainable product development practices. This paper extends the NIST product core model to serve as the product information model supporting LCED of the product. We propose the disassembly–logic–network (D–L–N) to map the product and the life cycle activities to the abstract model. This model facilitates the evaluation of DFA, DFD, DFR and almost all the other phases of LCED. We develop a comprehensive LCAT using Microsoft Visual C++. The main components of this tool, its methodology and the key technologies used to develop this LCAT are demonstrated in this paper. It is important that similar computer aided tools be developed for design for the environment (DFE).