Abstract
The growing emphasis on environmentally conscious design and manufacturing approaches has placed new burdens on designers. The amount of information available to designers is of great significance in making life cycle assessments on a product. However, well-established commercial CAD systems do not provide means for evaluating most of the different life cycle aspects of the product being modeled. Hence there is a need to have a CAD-environment where the life cycle tools (DFX tools in this work) are integrated with these systems so that life cycle design is made possible. In the research discussed in this paper, the specific focus is to enable the quantification and enhancement of product assemblability, serviceability, recyclability, remanufacturability, de-manufacturability, 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.