Requirements Analyses to Support a Material Information Model for Sustainability

Abstract

Materials, and therefore material selections, influence the sustainable impact of a product from beginning to end-of-life. With improved access to material information, product designers can attain newfound insight into the sustainability implications of their design decisions. Insight to lifecycle tradeoffs requires access to both upstream and downstream information at design time. This access can be facilitated by information transparency between the different information representations assumed by a product throughout its lifecycle. A well-constructed Material Information Model (MIM) can provide the necessary access, and therefore the desired insight. In this paper we present an initial set of requirements that a MIM for sustainability must support to provide the desired design-time information access. Using these requirements as guidelines, we then analyze several information representations currently available for information management at various stages of the lifecycle. We compare and contrast the extent to which these representations meet the information needs of the MIM, using example implementations as guidelines. We discuss the level to which information synthesis may be achieved given the varying degrees to which the MIM requirements are met. Finally, we introduce where synthesis challenges lie and the steps required to overcome them.

Visual Analytics Tools for Sustainable Lifecycle Design: Current Status, Challenges, and Future Opportunities

“…Technologies such as the semantic web, are a promising and emerging field, and can potentially trace linkages across different lifecycle stages [55, 189]. In this regard, one promising effort is the Industrial Ontology Foundry (IOF), a collaboration in its infancy aiming to construct standardized ontologies for product lifecycle data.…”