An ontological approach for the integration of life cycle assessment into product data management systems

Abstract

The consideration of environmental aspects into product design is becoming more and more a key strategic feature of products. However, the inclusion of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Eco design aspects in design is still far from being common practice. The complexity of the task, time-consumption and additional workload during design process may be some reasons therefore. There have been some efforts to integrate LCA in CAD systems and Product Data Management systems (PDM) to ease the handling of data and to assist the designer. However, these concepts suffer from inflexible data and database structures which are difficult to maintain and to update, in particular when complex products are designed in collaborative teams. This chapter presents an ontological approach to include environmental data in PDM systems. This approach reduces complexity of data structures, eases the use of environmental assessment methods and eases the sharing of product relevant information. © Springer-Verlag London 2013.