Enabling Product Development Engineers to Select and Combine Methods for Sustainable Design

A broad range of engineering methods, from simple checklists to sophisticated analytical tools, has been introduced to support the development of more sustainable products. Nevertheless, a lack of holistic approaches, which support the entire product creation process, can be observed. Combining the advantages of different existing methods could enable a rather continuous decision support. This paper presents an analysis and a categorization of current tools. On this foundation a process-based approach for method selection and combination is derived. By determining the concrete output of a method it becomes possible to use this information for defining sustainability milestones in project management. Hence, the allocation of design methods to different phases of the product creation process can be performed more intuitively and a combination of methods is encouraged. In order to test this approach, an exemplary redesign of a turbocharger has been conducted. From a pool of 50 methods nine are systematically selected and applied in order to check whether the selection was successful or not. (C) 2014 Published by Elsevier B.V.