Environmentally conscious decision making in engineering design

In modern design, environmentally conscious issues such as energy saving, recycling properties and maintenance etc. must be considered in the product development process. Useful environmentally conscious information can be captured, analyzed and organized as design knowledge. Early design intent of a designer can be propagated to down stream design activities using this knowledge as an evaluation index. In this context, a design intent management (DIM) module associated with a life-cycle assessment (LCA) inventory, a feature coding design knowledge base, and an automatic function-to-form mapping module are developed concurrently and embedded in an integrated environmentally conscious design (IECD) system being developed in the Design Technology Research Centre of School of Design at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. A case study involving the design intent management module, the propagation module to follow-up design activities and a design knowledge base supporting decision making in engineering design process are presented In this work. The capabilities of the current system being implemented are highlighted.