Chapter 1: Early Stage Issues

Title: Understanding the Evolution of Product Lifecycle Information with respect to Lifecycle Assessment in Design

Author(s): Srinivas Kota, Amaresh Chakrabarti

Address: Innovation, Design Study and Sustainability Laboratory, Centre for Product Design and Manufacturing, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore - 560012 | Innovation, Design Study and Sustainability Laboratory, Centre for Product Design and Manufacturing, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore - 560012

Reference: International Conference on Product Lifecycle Management 2006 pp. 300 - 313

Abstract/Summary: Products make substantial impact on the environment. Literature suggests that earlier phases of product development can play a major role in reducing these impacts because decisions about how a product will behave during its lifecycle stages are constrained by the decisions taken during product development, causing unintended environmental impact. As a result, there is a need to consider the whole lifecycle of a product rather than its isolated stages during product development. Lifecycle Assessment (LCA) is currently the most promising technique for estimating environmental impacts of a product during its lifecycle. Currently, detailed methods for LCA are critically dependent on high volumes of product specific data, are time consuming and often unaffordable. Current approximate LCA methods are either incomplete, inaccurate or require prior knowledge of what data is important. In this research, our goal is to understand the evolution of product information for all the phases of lifecycle in different stages of design, and based on these observations, to develop a method for estimating the environmental impact of a product during its lifecycle at different stages of its development. During product development, there is often a lack of accurate information about a product's structure and lifecycle stages, and related impact information – both temporal and spatial. As information about the product lifecycle continues to evolve during development, the assessment method should be such that it incorporates the different levels of abstraction about product information. The paper will discuss the result of descriptive studies undertaken to understand product lifecycle information evolution, based on which requirements for the assessment method were identified. Subsequent tasks are design, and implementation of the method, and its evaluation using in-house design experiments to assess its effectiveness and efficiency.

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