Metrics-based Integrated Predictive Performance Models for Optimized Sustainable Product Design

Implementing sustainable manufacturing principles and practices leads to innovation and sustainable value creation at product, process and system levels. In recent years, with the exponential growth in sustainable manufacturing research to meet the rapidly growing needs of industry and society, significant emphasis has been placed on designing innovative sustainable products and developing and implementing novel and advanced sustainable manufacturing processes to produce such sustainable products in automotive, aerospace, consumer products, biomedical and power industries. Sustainable manufacturing has been recognized as the driver for innovation in the manufacturing industrial sector. Achieving sustainable manufacturing targets inevitably requires a metrics-based analysis of sustainable manufacturing at product, process and systems levels. This paper presents an overview of the 6R (Reduce, Reuse and Recycle, Recover, Redesign and Remanufacture) approach to promote sustainable manufacturing to enable closed-loop, multiple life-cycle material flow. The paper specifically focuses on sustainable product design for manufacture, with an in-depth analysis of product design and development processes by utilizing the novel 6R methodology. The transformation of conventional product design processes to sustainable product design/development is presented by expanding the recently-proposed metrics-based sustainable product evaluation method to include integrated predictive performance models for optimized sustainable product design. Designing sustainable products is presented as the most effective pathway towards promoting innovation and sustainable value creation.