Life cycle design support based on environmental information sharing

The Green Browser is a design support tool, intended to cover the whole life cycle of environmentally conscious products. It supports designers to collaborate based on information sharing of the product over the Internet. It facilitates communication with consumers and specialists in order to receive feedback for the continuous design. The shared model of the Green Browser consists of three parts, i.e., strategy model, process model, and object model, which are linked to one another. The strategy model represents the concept of a product, in which requirements for the product are represented in a trade-off network. The process model represents the life cycle of a product. The object model represents geometry, function, and structure. These models are built and linked by designers by the support of the Green Browser. Some part of them is also accessible over the Internet from customers and specialists. The Green Browser is being implemented in Java and CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture). Java enables the Green Browser to be platform independent and executable on any major web browser. CORBA provides the Java-based Green Browser with access to the product database on a different architecture across the network. Through the Green Browser, the user can find information about the relationship between the requirements in the strategy model and product data in the object models. Several kinds of user interfaces are implemented to represent the strategy model in different perspectives. The concept and the implementation of the Green Browser are reported in this paper.