Generating Contextual Design for Environment Principles in Sustainable Manufacturing Using Visual Analytics

Design for environment (DfE) principles are helpful for integrating manufacturing-specific environmental sustainability considerations into product and process design. However, such principles are often overly general, static, and disconnected from production contexts. This paper proposes a visual analytics (VA)-based framework for generating DfE principles that are contextualized to specific production setups. These principles are generated through interactive visual exploration of design and process parameters as well as manufacturing process performance metrics corresponding to the production setup. We also develop a formal schema for aiding storage, updating, and reuse of the generated DfE principles. In this schema, each DfE principle is associated with corresponding product lifecycle data and the evidence that led to the generation of that principle. We demonstrate the proposed VA framework using data from an industry-led experiment that compared dry ice (DI)-based and oil-based milling for a specific production setup.