Title: Digital integration of total lifecycle tools for sustainable product design

Authors: Fazleena Badurdeen; Sanjeev Srivastava; Dmitriy Okunev; I.S. Jawahir

Addresses: Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, 40506, USA; Institute for Sustainable Manufacturing, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, 40506, USA ' Amazon, Arlington, VA, 22202, USA ' Research Group of Design and Representation Systems, Department of Simulation and Digital Twins, Siemens Technology, 755 College Road East, Princeton, NJ, 08540, USA ' Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, 40506, USA; Institute for Sustainable Manufacturing, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, 40506, USA

Abstract: To promote sustainable manufacturing it is imperative that closed-loop material flows are considered during sustainable product design. The usefulness of various sustainable product design decision support tools depends on the ability to access accurate data related to the different lifecycle stages. The importance of digitally integrating disparate data sources and the potential for using digital threads to facilitate integration has been widely discussed. However, the approach to develop such digitally integrated capabilities is lacking in extant literature. This paper presents the development of an interoperable digital thread to integrate data from different sources across the total lifecycle interfaced with a suite of decision support tools. The application of the digitally integrated capability is demonstrated using an industrial case study. Results demonstrate the effectiveness of the digital thread to acquire data from different lifecycle stages and to conduct sustainability performance analyses to help identify the most sustainable product configuration designs.

Keywords: sustainable product design; digital thread; decision support tools.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSM.2022.134571

International Journal of Sustainable Manufacturing, 2022 Vol.5 No.2/3/4, pp.217 - 237

Received: 29 Mar 2022
Received in revised form: 07 Jun 2023
Accepted: 19 Jul 2023
Published online: 27 Oct 2023 *

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