Life-cycle engineering seeks to incorporate various product life-cycle values into the early stages of design. These values include functional performance, manufacturability, serviceability, and environmental impact. We start with a survey of life-cycle engineering research focusing on methodologies and tools. Further, the paper addresses critical research issues in life-cycle design tools: design representation and measures for life-cycle evaluation. The paper describes our design representation scheme based on a semantic network that is effective for evaluating the structural layout. Evaluation measures for serviceability and recyclability illustrate the practical use of these representation schemes.
Abstract
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.
Design Support for VOC Control in SMEs by Simulation-Based Life-Cycle Engineering Part 2: Case Study of Metal Cleaning Process
