Integrating Life Cícle Aspects Within Product Family Design: An Example for SMEs

Abstract

Recent concern for the environment and high competition in globalized markets pose eminent requirements to the producing industry, including small and medium sized enterprises. Envisioned goals of a eco-design combined with a drastical reduction of product development time and increase of customized features of products require new strategies and tools. One solution subject to international investigation is the development of modular products. This approach we enhance by integrating life cycle assessment. Work done in this field was concentrated on developing methods to define either a product's platform architecture or relationships between product modules and documented customer needs within the design analysis of product families. Unfortunately, all of these approaches failed to include a framework to enable also the integration of life cycle assessment. Within the scope of the work described in this paper, we target fundamental problems within the design of product families regarding the integration of life cycle assessment and economic application of information technology, suitable in terms of cost and performance for small and medium sized enterprises. The application field, where first case studies were undertaken and real product models implemented was within the design of parallel-shaft speed reducers.