Proposal of an integrated design environment for scenario-based lifecycle design

Minimizing environmental loads and costs throughout a product lifecycle requires appropriate lifecycle design. Design of a product lifecycle involves planning lifecycle strategies, evaluating them from various viewpoints and optimizing the overall picture. Product lifecycle strategy can be planned explicitly by describing lifecycle scenarios at an early stage of lifecycle design and the product should be designed to realize the scenario. This paper proposes a design environment for scenario-based lifecycle design. The main approach is to define a representational scheme of a product and its lifecycle in order to integrate them. Our method links a lifecycle model to appropriate product architecture and manages the consistency between them. A case study indicates that the relationship between the lifecycle and the product model is successfully represented on a computer and designers can design a product and its lifecycle in an integrated manner.