Companies are under increasing pressure to deal with environmental concerns during
product design, for it is the design process which primarily decides the environmental
impact of a manufactured product over its life. Tools which assist in taking a life cycle
view of the product are a necessary support to designers. Prime amongst these tools is Life
Cycle Assessment (LCA). However, a major criticism of LCA methodologies is that while
they provide advice on environmentally superior product designs, they do not provide
guidance on the economic impact. With product take back increasingly likely to become
the responsibility of producer companies attention is now being paid to the later phases of
a products life, such as maintenance and disposal costs. A new methodology is shown to
be required to complement LCA, one which considers the economic implications of
environmentally superior designs over the whole product life.
It is argued that a major challenge of such a methodology will be how it deals with the
uncertainty associated with the future. The research provides a review of product life cycle
design methodologies and a critique of existing approaches to uncertainty. A design teams
requirements for decision support that deals with product economic life cycle uncertainty
is presented and a decision support methodology which meets these requirements is
described. The methodology builds upon the theory of life cycle costing. In practice, the
methodology integrates a computer based life cycle model with statistical techniques to
quantify the contribution of life cycle variables. In bringing these proven but previously
separate tools together the method resolves the issue of uncertainty in a novel and
acceptable way.
Through the use of an in-depth industrial case study, it is shown that the methodology
provides practical support to the design team to produce economically superior product
life cycle designs