Design for sustainability

New directions in modern industry are creating distributed virtual enterprises and pushing companies towards service-enhanced products. Both trends converge when a Virtual Manufacturing Enterprise (VME) is created to provide product-service solutions. At the same time, sustainability is a crucial aspect for industrial networks. This paper proposes a methodology to assess the sustainability of Product-Service Systems (PSS) in a VME by modelling an integrated lifecycle, defining impact categories and KPIs, and evaluating all the partners' contributions. The method allows easily comparing PSS design alternatives to each other or with traditional products. The industrial case study is represented by a "washing as a service" solution proposed by a worldwide VME. Sustainability assessment is useful to highlight the service benefits as well as the critical phases, and to support VME decision-making. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2013.

Keywords: Product-Service Systems (PSS) , Service-enhanced products , Sustainability , Sustainable manufacturing networks , Virtual Manufacturing Enterprise (VME)

Nowadays, industrial products, particularly household appliances, are strongly related to environmental issues. Due to high levels of uncertainty regarding design embodiments at the early design phase, new methods and tools are essential to provide designers a basis to determine the degree of sustainability of a given product. The paper aims to integrate ecodesign activities within the traditional flow of the product design process through the development of an integrated software platform which supports the decision-making task for product sustainability in the early phase of product design.

Keywords: Design for environment , Eco-design , Product development process

Purpose It is well known that industrial processes require large consumption of energy and other resources during the product manufacturing phase. This exploitation of energy is reflected both in terms of environmental impact and in terms of economic impact, which can be measured through specific tools. The measurement of these environmental and economic impacts is an essential step towards both the control of the energy consumption and energy costs and in sustainability energy assessment. In this paper is presented the extrusion process of plastic materials in a big Italian company. This process is highly energy-consuming and for this reason it is necessary monitoring the energy consumption and controlling the process parameters to increase the energy sustainability and, at the same time, decrease the environmental and social impacts. The aim of this work is presenting a methodology to capture the extrusion process sustainability to have a base line useful to compare the results of any other extrusion process assessment. Design/methodology/approach The proposed methodology aims to identify the high energy consuming machineries, components, and devices in the company. To do this, the industrial process must be organised in several functional components which have a specific number of input and output. The first step in this propose is the process evaluation in terms of the definition of the functional modules involved and the identification of the input/output needed in each one. After the collection of these data, the next step is the assessment of the environmental and economic impacts through Life Cycle Assessment analysis (LCA) and Life Cycle Cost Assessment analysis (LCCA). This study is supported by a hardware and software infrastructure among the extrusion process machineries and the SimaPro tool to conduct the LCA and LCCA analyses. Originality/value The innovation of this paper is to consider the Life Cycle Assessment of a process through the evaluation of each its components. The resulted impacts are focused on the process sustainability and not on the product sustainability as is instead largely made clear in the literature. The results of this work are related to the definition of a methodology in the field of industrial processes evaluation; in fact, it has been defined a new approach to conduct the Life Cycle Assessment focused on the industrial process and it has been suggested a method to evaluate the Energy Sustainability in a highly energy-consuming process.

Keywords: Energy efficiency , Process life cycle assessment , Process monitoring , Sustainable manufacturing

The sustainable growth dilemma requires providing well-matched prosperity to current citizens, aimed at preserving suited life-quality standards. Currently, civilization intentionally alters the surrounding wilderness. The changes include using biological sources (agricultural revolution) and energy supplies (industrial revolution) purposefully promoted and performed by men. The modern growth decisively exploits skilful provisions acquired from fossil and fissile earth stocks, through totally technical and non-conservative ways. The instant disadvantages of this are paid by contamination, inexorably altering the bio-sphere. The engineer's doings in the new millennium have to cope with ecological quality objectives, curbing the industrialism practices, in view to provide visibility of all induced changes and to apply the responsible recovery measures. Here, the overview of the state of the art is shown, in particular addressing the design of "product-service" items, deliberately considering the early specifications for the lifecycle and the dismissal phases, and the integration prerequisites in the supply chain management, explaining the usefulness of network aids and the connected commercial modifications. The challenge is extraordinary and involves socio-cultural aspects, too. The discussion, although offering sketchy images, concerns technical suggestions, basically limited to assessing the life cycle eco-coherence as total company challenge. The business design conditions embed compulsory legal issues, requiring worldwide management.

The sustainable growth dilemma requires providing well-matched prosperity to current citizens, aimed at preserving suited life-quality standards. Currently, civilization intentionally alters the surrounding wilderness. The changes include using biological sources (agricultural revolution) and energy supplies (industrial revolution) purposefully promoted and performed by men. The modern growth decisively exploits skilful provisions acquired from fossil and fissile earth stocks, through totally technical and non-conservative ways. The instant disadvantages of this are paid by contamination, inexorably altering the bio-sphere. The engineer's doings in the new millennium have to cope with ecological quality objectives, curbing the industrialism practices, in view to provide visibility of all induced changes and to apply the responsible recovery measures. Here, the overview of the state of the art is shown, in particular addressing the design of "product-service" items, deliberately considering the early specifications for the lifecycle and the dismissal phases, and the integration prerequisites in the supply chain management, explaining the usefulness of network aids and the connected commercial modifications. The challenge is extraordinary and involves socio-cultural aspects, too. The discussion, although offering sketchy images, concerns technical suggestions, basically limited to assessing the life cycle eco-coherence as total company challenge. The business design conditions embed compulsory legal issues, requiring worldwide management.

This paper quantitatively reports about potential energy savings on robotic assembly lines for the automotive industry. The key aspect of the proposed approach is that both cell production rate and robot hardware limitations are considered as strict constraints, so that no plant revision is needed. The methodology relies on: a) calculation of energy-optimal trajectories, by means of time scaling, concerning the robots' motion from the last process point to the home positions; b) reduction of the energy consumption via earlier release of the actuator brake when the robots are kept stationary. Simulation results are presented, which are based on the production timing characteristics measured on a real plant. © 2012 IEEE.

Keywords: Energy Efficiency , Industrial Robots , Production Planning , Trajectory Scaling

In recent years, environmentally conscious design has become a fundamental approach for industries which have to consider the variable environment during the design process. Waste management is one of the most important aspects to be handled, to reduce the disposal in landfills and to encourage the sustainable 3R approach: Reuse, Recycling and Remanufacturing. Product disassembly is an essential phase of the product lifecycle, necessary to evaluate the End-of-Life (EoL) strategies and to reduce environmental impact. In order to minimize the impact on production and costs it is very important to consider EoL scenarios during the embodiment design phase, when designer's decisions influence product structure. Design for Disassembly (DFD) is a powerful method to reduce disassembly time and costs. However, there are no useful tools which provide guidelines to improve the product disassemblability or promote specific EoL scenarios. For these reasons this paper describes an innovative Design for Disassembly approach and related tool to support designers in product disassemblability evaluation. The tool has the scope to manage EoL scenarios for industrial waste in the early design phases and to share metadata with the traditional design tools. Disassembly costs is one of the most important parameters during the evaluation of EoL scenarios. Six indices are presented to evaluate the economic and environmental feasibility of the EoL strategies. The calculation of the six indices permits alternative EoL scenarios to be compared and encourage the recyclability, reusability or re-manufacturability of a product. These evaluations can be used to foster a particular EoL scenario, as early on as in the design process. The preliminary analysis on mechatronic products underline the utility of the software tool and indices. Product re-design, realized using this approach, shows a relevant decrease in environmental impacts and disassembly costs. As a consequence, the new product has a relevant percentage of components with a closed-loop lifecycle. © 2012 by ASME.

Smart products are becoming more present in everyday life. They are prevalent in different markets such as electronic devices, cars and household appliances. One important dimension of product smartness is "multi- functionality". When choosing a product, the consumer takes into account subjective and objective purchase drivers. Price, brand, aesthetics, environmental impact and functionalities represent an important set of these. In this context the work are interested in correlating two drivers: functions and eco-sustainability. Generally, this last characteristic should be maximized taking into consideration a correct balance with product functionalities. The aim of this work is to investigate this correlation. It can be measured by a suitable correspondence in order to determine a quantitative law. This relationship can be useful to the designers to determine the product features during the product design phase, but it can be also used by consumers to compare similar products. This paper reports the problem domain, approach for correlation law definition and, finally, the experimental analysis of product functions vs. environmental sustainability. Two case studies in the household appliances sector will exemplify the proposed analysis. Copyright © 2012 by ASME.

Keywords: Environmental impact , Functions , Product design , Product evaluation

PLM is a widely recognized approach to reduce time to market, increase process efficiency and control product lifecycle. However, service-oriented management is becoming increasingly popular to create new business infrastructures able to self-organize tangible and intangible manufacturing assets in a distributed and interoperable way [1]. The final scope is to manage not simply the Product but also Services along the value chain. The great modern challenge is the implementation of such a service-oriented approach and the shift from PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) to SLM (Service Lifecycle Management). This paper proposes a structured method to define a TO-BE service-oriented scenario and elicit business requirements towards the creation of an SLM-based ecosystem. A case study is developed in collaboration with an Italian company leader in household appliances. It focuses on washing machine, investigates AS-IS and TO-BE business scenarios by adopting Functional Analysis and Business Use Cases (BUC), and then defines the necessary business requirements to implement a service-based approach and create the future SLM ecosystem. © 2012 International Federation for Information Processing.

Keywords: Ecosystem Collaboration , SLM (Service Lifecycle Management) , SSME (Service Science, Management and Engineering) , Virtual Factories

Electric motors are one of the most common electrical components used both in industrial and household applications. In order to reduce world energy consumption and environmental impact, electric motors need to be improved in terms of efficiency and eco-sustainability. For this reason it is necessary to improve environmental consciousness, favouring the application of eco-design guidelines in the design phase, which is the most important stage where "green" solutions can be rapidly ideated, evaluated and optimized. Different aspects have to be concurrently considered in order to achieve a high quality product in a short time to market. In this context, the present paper describes an innovative web-based software platform to configure and simulate customized energy efficient electric motors. The core of the platform is a knowledge-based system which aims to standardize the design process according to the rules which represent the company know-how and best practices. The platform integrates different software tools to support the development from conceptual design to detailed design, and from the configuration of design solutions up to environmental impact assessment and manufacturing cost evaluation. It also provides a collaborative area in order to improve the collaboration among remote users involved in the design process, thanks to the sharing of important design data and models. The presented practical case studies demonstrate the effectiveness of the platform application. The achieved results demonstrate the improvement of the configured solutions in comparison with the traditional adopted motors. The new motors exhibit both a considerable increase in energy efficiency and at the same time relevant improvement in product sustainability combined with acceptable production costs. © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Collaborative design , Eco-design , Electric motors , Energy efficiency , Knowledge-based system

Product disassembly is an important phase of the product lifecycle. It occurs to minimize the maintenance time and evaluate the End-of-Life (EoL) strategies, for example component reuse/recycling. These scenarios should be considered during the design process when decisions influence product architecture/structure. In this context, the present work describes an approach to support the designer's evaluation of disassemblability by using the 3D CAD model structure and suitable key indices related to product features. A software system allows the product model to be analyzed and evaluates the disassemblability degree. An experimental case study facilitates the approach demonstration and highlights product performance.

Keywords: Design for disassembly , End-of-Life , Industrial products

Developing green propulsion concepts for aviation requires some changes in standard procedures for the preliminary aircraft design. Standard design procedures are not readily applicable to aircraft/rotorcraft that use multiple energy sources; innovative concepts like hybrid propulsion systems require new approaches in weight and performance prediction. In this paper the application of new methods is explored to account for the changes in the governing equations when using hybrid propulsion: a design code allows predicting the performances once the hybrid propulsion architecture is chosen. Focus is on hybrid propulsion systems based on a diesel heavy fuel ICE (Internal Combustion Engine) combined with an electric motor in a parallel configuration. This study relies on simple structure and material performance indexes, neglects stability and control analysis, and uses very simple aerodynamic models.

Keywords: Aircraft sizing , Diesel , Hybrid propulsion

This paper presents a novel concept of container mobile housing system denominated ZETHa (Zero Energy Temporary Habitation). It is based on the LESP (Low Exergy Structured Panel) concept, in which the acclimatization is realized by water recirculation inside the external walls of the building and the ZEBRA concept (Zero Energy Consumption building. This evaluation will also consider energy needs by appliances. Copyright © 2012 by ASME.

The international stability is viewed as corollary of the sustainable growth. This has only technology-driven solution, at global village extension, with required appropriateness and shared acceptation. The survey, on such guess, looks at the robot age potential, as supplementary aid in the balanced world deployment that adds to the socio-economic and politico-legal frames. The analysis moves from the globalisation issues, at the known (economic) global and (ecologic) no-global pictures, to outline the traits of the post-global robot age, consistent with the sustainable growth, international stability, and grounded on the force of the law. Stability based on the law of the force was the past option, even allowing steady truces. In this analysis, globalisation makes this choice unfit, having doubtful economic and social sustainability and not achieving ecologic sustainability consistently and for the long term. Copyright © 2012, IGI Global.

Keywords: Economy vs. Ecology Prospects , Globalisation and World Stability , Knowledge Society , Social Change Models , Technology and the Environment

The present work sets the basis for the development of a systematic eco-sustainable computer aided design procedure. During years modules for the specific design of all phases of a product life-cycle have been developed: manufacturing, assembly, reliability, maintainability, resilience, disassembly, end-of-use, etc. This work instead places itself in a broader context of "Design for ecology". It means to overcome the limits of a classic design process such as "Design for X", through an approach that makes the designer aware of the consequences that each design modification (to the geometry, the material or the manufacturing process) determines on the environmental impact of the product entire life-cycle. This work proposes a method of integrated management of (1)virtual prototyping software (such as structural optimization, FEM and CAD), (2) function modelling methodology and (3) LCA tools. It is mainly based on the configuration of structural optimization strategies especially conceived to obtain lighter and more compact products, therefore, more eco-sustainable. The method, due to the nature of the instruments it employs, can be applied only to products that can be modelled in a CAD environment. The article, in particular, shows how to articulate the workflow between virtual prototyping and LCA tools. A case study regarding a moped rim is used to explain the procedure while software implementation is still underway. Copyright © 2012 by ASME.

The interest in novel engineering methods and tools for optimizing the energy consumption in robotic systems is currently increasing. In particular, from an industry point of view, it is desirable to develop energy saving strategies applicable also to established manufacturing systems, being liable of small possibilities for adjustments. Within this scenario, an engineering method is reported for reducing the total energy consumption of pick-and-place manipulators for given end-effector trajectory. Firstly, an electromechanical model of parallel/serial manipulators is derived. Then, an energy-optimal trajectory is calculated, by means of time scaling, starting from a pre-scheduled trajectory performed at maximum speed (i.e. compatible with actuators limitations). A simulation case study finally shows the effectiveness of the proposed procedure. © 2011 IEEE.

Keywords: energy efficiency , Pick-and-place manipulators

The paper reports an exemplary application in the field of wood pellets production of an original methodology to support business process re-engineering by mapping product requirements to product development phases in order to analyse their contribution to value creation. The methodology has been already published and validated by the authors in different industrial sectors through real case studies, all characterized by well-established business processes, needing improvements to preserve their competitiveness on the marketplace. In this paper the effectiveness of the methodology in identifying process criticalities is tested with regards to industrial processes experiencing under capacities in satisfying the market demand as well as concerning not yet established business ideas. According tothis perspective, the wood pellet production process is a suitable case study. In fact, this industrial sector presents high business opportunities in Italy, since the market demand of such kind of energy sources has grown dramatically in the last five years. However, the poor performance of current industrial processes not yet at a mature stage does not allow the complete exploitation of the biomass resources, thus the market demand of woody fuels remains unsatisfied. The paper first positions the work of the authors with respect to already established business processre-engineering techniques; then summarizes the original methodology and details its application in the biofuel field.

Keywords: Business process re-engineering , Customer satisfaction , Pellet manufacturing improvements , Process value analysis , Under development business opportunities

The paper proposes an extension of the Design Structure Matrix to support designers in a rough sustainability evaluation of an industrial device in the early stage of its development. The methodology of assessment is based on an Augmented DSM (A-DSM), where the original DSM layout has been modified to allow developers to record information about product lifecycle and to manage the interactions of product components among them, towards other systems and with the environment outside. After a description of the novel matrix layout, a method is formalized. The proposed methodology will show that product evaluation is achieved by means of a combination of partial results that can be calculated already in conceptual phase: a set of environmental indicators and a couple of sustainability performance values. In accordance with this approach, the method is conceived as sustainability control panel useful to evaluate early environmental performance.

Keywords: A-DSM , Conceptual design , Early assessment , Functional analysis , Simplified LCA