Decision Support Tools for Sustainable Manufacturing

The objective of this proposal is to establish the feasibility of developing an integrated decision support tool that transforms the current time-consuming and reactive (post-design) sustainability assessment into a real-time, proactive approach available in the early phases of product design. This tool, called Sustainability Integrated into Early Design (SIED), will define and capture lifecycle-wide information relevant to sustainability and its assessment, and make it available in the product design phase. The availability of this information in a timely and accurate manner, in turn, will enable the development of value-added, vertically specialized tools for activities such as material usage monitoring, energy monitoring and recyclability analysis. In this phase I project, we shall focus on: 1. Requirement analysis to determine the constituents of information that need to be managed 2. Formalization of integrated data models to describe how data should be stored, linked and accessed 3. Proof of concept prototype to demonstrate feasibility and use in decision-making.