Proposal of consistency management method between product and its life cycle for supporting life cycle design

In order to increase value and reduce environmental loads and resource consumption over the entire product life cycle, a designer should design a product life cycle as well as a product in an integrated manner. In order to support such integrated life cycle design, we are currently developing Life Cycle CAD (LC-CAD) system. Indispensable requirements for LC-CAD system include the following three points: (1) Representing a product and its life cycle in an integrated manner, (2) Managing the consistency of the relationship between a product and its life cycle, and (3) Life cycle evaluation by using the information of a product and its life cycle. This paper focuses on the function (1) and (2), and proposes a method of consistency management between a product and its life cycle. For this purpose, this paper proposes a method for representing a product and its life cycle with defining the relationship between these two models. Then, this paper proposes a management scheme for the consistency of the relationship. We developed a prototype systemand applied it to design of Liquid Cristal Display (LCD) TV as a case study. The result indicates that the relationship between a product and its life cycle is successfully represented and managed, and that a designer can design them in an integrated manner.