Issues in Product Life Cycle Engineering Analysis

Traditional engineering analysis of product designs has focused primarily on a product’s operational performance without considering costs of manufacturing and other stages downstream from design. In contrast, life cycle analysis of a product during its initial development can play a crucial role in determining the product’s overall life cycle cost and useful life span. This paper examines product life cycle engineering analysis - measurement of product operational performance in a life cycle context. Life cycle engineering analysis is thus considered both as an extension of traditional engineering analysis methods and as a subset of a total product life cycle analysis. The issues critical to life cycle engineering analysis are defined and include product life cycle data modeling and analysis, analysis tools and their performance regimes, performance tradeoff measurement and problems of life cycle engineering analysis in an organizational context. Recommendations are provided for future research directions into life cycle engineering analysis in the context of integration architectures for concurrent engineering.