Towards computer aided design for the life cycle

A growing concern about the environment has motivated research into environmentally conscious design and manufacturing approaches, placing new burdens on designers. In order to aid designers in their new tasks, one of our objectives is to minimize the gathering of information and maximize the utility of existing design information. In the research discussed in this paper, the specific focus is to enable the quantification and enhancement of product assemblability, serviceability, remanufacturability, recyclability, demanufacturability, and life cycle impact during product design. Guidelines for integrating some of the commercially available CAD packages (I-DEAS and Pro/ENGINEER) to these assessment models, and ways to use the input information to some these assessments for making other assessments are developed. A case study is given to illustrate the approach.