Developing Sustainable Products: An Interdisciplinary Challenge
This paper presents an interdisciplinary method that allows engineers to map their view, that is usually focused on product parameters and characteristics, to the view of sustainability assessment experts, whose view is on a higher abstraction level and m
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Abstract This paper presents an interdisciplinary method that allows engineers to map their view, that is usually focused on product parameters and characteristics, to the view of sustainability assessment experts, whose view is on a higher abstraction level and mainly focused on officially accepted sustainability indicators. The presented approach proposes to bridge the conceptual gap between the different views of both disciplines by focusing on a product’s life-cycle processes such as manufacturing, distribution and end-of-life processes. Details about these processes need to be provided by respective experts that thus must be included into the interdisciplinary design process. The presented method builds on the House of Quality method and uses the existing Sustainability Dashboard software tool for a visual comparison of different design alternatives.
Keywords Sustainability Interdisciplinary challenge House of sustainability Life cycle sustainability assessment Sustainable engineering
K. Lindow (&) Department of Machine Tools and Factory Management, School of Mechanical Engineering and Transportation Systems, Technische Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany e-mail: [email protected] R. Woll R. Stark Fraunhofer Institute Production Systems and Design Technology, Virtual Product Creation, Berlin, Germany e-mail: [email protected] R. Stark e-mail: [email protected]
A. Chakrabarti and R. V. Prakash (eds.), ICoRD’13, Lecture Notes in Mechanical Engineering, DOI: 10.1007/978-81-322-1050-4_41, Springer India 2013
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1 Introduction The life cycle of a product/system roughly comprises design, manufacturing planning, manufacturing, use, maintenance, remanufacturing and the end of life situation respectively. Since design engineers basically do not have sufficient knowledge to evaluate the sustainability impacts of a product regarding the entire life cycle they have to rely on expertise from other disciplines, such as environmental and manufacturing engineering. Hence, evaluating and assessing a product/ system’s sustainability impact requires an interdisciplinary and cooperative approach, already during the design phase. The paper presents on the one hand the results of the research project ‘‘Methodological sustainability assessment of machine components in the development process’’. The purpose of the project was to develop a method that allows a design engineer to estimate the impact of design decisions on the sustainability of a product/system already in the early design phase. To make this possible, design decisions have to be associated with the evaluation criteria for sustainability assessment. This in turn necessitates deep knowledge about the product/system’s process, such as manufacturing, logistics, end-of-life treatment. Apart from the new approach that was developed—a methodology that combines the House of Quality (HoQ) [1] approach with an integrated Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment (LCSA) covering (environmental) Life Cycle Asse
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