GreenPLM: the concept of sharing community knowledge for new green product development and process planning

The issue of eco-friendliness and sustainable development is crucial in various domains of our lives. This also affects the production of products and the provision of services. One of the first stages of a product's life deserves special attention, i.e. the area of new product development, in which all its features and limitations are defined, which also results in the type of manufacturing process. Therefore, this paper aims to explore and propose the possibility of implementing mechanisms for evaluating the environmental performance of products and processes at that stage of product life using product life cycle management tools. One of the main assumptions was that the developed data model would facilitate sharing of experiences and knowledge with an open community of users. For this purpose, the concept of effective community knowledge management in new product development was developed. The proposed model of such a framework considers the significant participation of all actors and data sources, both internal and external, in creating and managing the knowledge base about green indicators and related objects. In the final step, we present the concept of effective management and sharing of knowledge by the community, creating the Green Product Lifecycle Management user community cloud to ensure the collected data's highest quality (ranking) and quantity (gamification). The work described was conducted and implemented in the GreenPLM project, which aimed to extend the functionality of existing systems to enable the assessment of the environmental performance of new products and processes at various stages of their lives.