Consistency Management System Between Product Design and the Lifecycle

Within the framework of sustainability in manufacturing industry, product lifecycle design is a key approach for constructing resource circulation systems of industrial products that drastically reduce environmental loads, resource consumption and waste generation. In such design, designers should consider both a product and its lifecycle from a holistic viewpoint, because the product’s structure, geometry, and other attributes are closely coupled with the characteristics of the lifecycle. Although product lifecycle management (PLM) systems integrate product data during its lifecycle into one data architecture, they do not focus on support for lifecycle design process. In other words, PLM does not provide explicit models for designing product lifecycles. This paper proposes an integrated model of a product and its lifecycle and a method for managing consistency between the two. For the consistency management, three levels of consistency (i.e., topological, geometric, and semantic) are defined. Based on this management scheme, the product lifecycle model allows designers to evaluate environmental, economic, and other performance of the designed lifecycle using lifecycle simulation.