Early design evaluation of products artifacts': An approach based on dimensional analysis for combined analysis of environmental, technical and cost requirements

Abstract

The early development process of products imposes to fulfill numerous types of requirements simultaneously. Those requirements are often qualitative and imprecise. The main tasks of a development team consist of grasping and understanding customer needs, refining these needs, synthesizing concepts of solutions, evaluating and selecting appropriate solutions. Evaluating and selecting solutions is a critical stage because various types of metrics are used to measure performances of concepts. This paper presents both theoretical contributions and practical implementations. This article presents a theoretical analysis of resource consumption and environmental impact from the viewpoint of exergy. In addition, this article provides a theoretical answer to the issue of qualitative modeling of early design concepts of solutions. This article opens a fruitful perspective for combining heterogeneous requirements in a coherent and systematic manner by using dimensional analysis calculus.