Systematic Life Cycle Design for Sustainable Product Development

Sustainable product development (SPD) requires that product design achieves minimum or zero environmental impact, in addition to satisfying the traditional design criteria such as product functionality, quality, features, costs and time to market. Therefore, the environmental evaluations must be incorporated into design stage. In this research, a product design process model was proposed which includes three design requirements, two design tasks, and three comprehensive assessment streams. The functional requirement is derived from the customer needs to reflect the product’s functional purpose; the environmental requirement reflects the society’s needs of protecting natural resources and environment; and the economic requirement is to ensure the company’s basic business goals. Accordingly, SPD aims to simultaneously carry out two tasks of designing products’ physical structures and lifecycle structures. In the assessment phase of product design, three assessment streams, 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 analysis of all three dimensions of LCQ, LCA, and LCC evaluations. Simplified LCA was used for environmental evaluations. The detailed assessment techniques are also developed for effective design evaluations. A case study will be provided to illustrate the methods and models.Copyright © 2003 by ASME