Development of an Information Model for the Integration of Product Design and Sustainability Evaluation

Sustainability evaluation is an important activity for product designers to make “green” decisions when applying the rules for “Design for Sustainability”. It allows the designers to have a quantifiable conception of sustainability about his/her design in the real time. The successful evaluation mechanisms necessitate a closed and complete information integration between the product design methodology and sustainability evaluation techniques. In this paper, we propose an integration framework, which brings the environmental impact assessment into the early product design stages for design sustainability analysis. An information model, which is based on the current CAD systems, has been developed to link the essential components in the framework for building a successful green product design system. A case study that simulates a part design scenario has been given to demonstrate the use of the proposed information model.