Selection of a green manufacturing process based on CAD features.

Summary Environmentally conscious manufacturing process (ECMP) has become an obligation to the environment and to the society itself, enforced primarily by governmental regulations and customer perspective on environmental issues. ECMP involves integrating environmental thinking into new product development. This is especially true in the computer-aided design (CAD) phase which is the last phase in the design process. At this stage, more than 80 % of choices are done. Feature technology (FT), the core of the CAD phase, is then used to integrate environmental aspects. Also, integrations realized on CAD systems, such as computer-aided manufacturing (CAM), computer-aided process plan (CAPP), and product life management (PLM), are explored to eco-design products. This paper presents a new methodology for the selection of a green manufacturing process based on CAD features and CAD/CAM/CAPP/PLM in-tegrations. Firstly, we present an overview of works using FT in the CAD phase to reduce the environmental impacts of a manufacturing process. Secondly, we propose an approach based on FT for selecting an ECMP to promote a new simple eco-design tool which helps inexperienced eco-designers. Finally, a case study is considered to validate the proposed approach and results are commented.