Study on UGNX-LCA Integration for Sustainable Product Development

It is beneficial to conduct LCA(Life Cycle Assessment) during early stages of product development, as the earlier the environmental problems associated with the product life cycle are discovered, the less costly and more effective the preventing measures are. However, due to the lack of data communication tools between CAD and LCA systems, life cycle data collection during design stage is difficult. This paper presents a feature-based method of UGNX-LCA integration for sustainable product development. A feature-based multi-view life cycle model for integrating product-process-LCI (Life Cycle Inventory) data is developed based on mapping mechanism between engineering domains of product design, process planning and LCA. Data migration from UGNX models to LCA, including UG modeling feature identification, UG-LC(Life Cycle) feature transformation and LC feature model output are realized by embedded integrator. A case study of data migration from UGNX to LCA is presented to demonstrate the proposed approach.