Integrating End-of-Life Evaluation in Conceptual Design

Today's product development is faced with an increasing pressure to reduce the time to market and respond to a growing quantity and complex design requirements. Besides economic aspects and customer requirements these requirements also comprise demands of new environmental legislation, such as the WEEE, RoHS and EUP directives by the European Union. These regulations force producers to take into account a product's life cycle performance already during the product development phase. This paper presents a new approach to improve the control of product requirements and its development process with the integration of the end-of-life oriented evaluation software ProdTect and the product conceptual design tool FOD. A washing machine is used as application example to demonstrate the advantages of this approach