Techniques for the integration of expert knowledge into the development of environmentally sound products

Industrial strategies for creating product innovation are aiming more and more at the development of environmentally sound products. Sustainability of products and their processes throughout the entire product lifecycle has been accepted by the enterprise managers as a challenging and continuous issue. The development of environmentally sound products, however, requires new paradigms for the product development process and new approaches in particular for a computerized virtual product development process. This contribution explains the new paradigms for continuous sustainability in the product development process such as prospective sustainability analysis based on an object-oriented product development environment. The architecture of the product development environment and its integrated product and process model determine the performance of the system and its acceptance by designers and product developers. The concept described here is subject of research at the University of Technology in Darmstadt, Germany. The main topic of this contribution is the compilation of expert knowledge about processes and emissions of the product lifecycle, its adaptation to boundary conditions and the implementation in product development tools. A running prototype of such an integrated product development tool has been implemented in Darmstadt. The concepts and applications discussed in this article are relevant to product developers as potential users of the systems and to software developers with a technical interest in developing such next generation solutions.