A new eco-design approach on CAD systems.

Summary Today it becomes necessary for manufacturers to adopt Eco-design to guard their place in the market. Eco-designing products, is reducing their environmental impact in the early design stages throughout all stages of their life cycle (raw material extraction, manufacturing process, use, transport and end of life treatments). In the literature, many tools and methodologies were developed to simplify the environmental task to the designer by helping him reduce the environmental impact of his products. The most of these works are based in feature-based modeling to extract data for realizing environmental evaluation (EE) also we found that this technology is essentially used in selecting a green machining process through Computer Aided Process Planning (CAPP). In this paper we propose a methodology based on feature technology and on the integrations realized on CAD systems such as CAD/CAM/CAPP and CAD/PLM to generate alternative scenarios in order to choose the most ecological one till feature’s selection. The environmental impact is calculated with CML method and shown to the designer as End-Points Indicators (Resources, Human Health, Eco-system damages) which are related to the designer’s Degrees of Freedom (DoFs). A case study was considered to valid our proposed approach and results are shown and compared to results obtained from SW sustainability and a complete LCA from SimaPro integrations.