Sustainable product development: Provision of information in early automotive engineering phases

Abstract

Sustainable product development is an important influencing factor in automotive engineering, whereby a comprehensive evaluation of its efforts and benefits is very complex. In addition, lots of information is not available in advance of mass production. This leads to the question, how results from impact assessment can be transferred to the beginning of the development process, where important decisions about product and production characteristics are made. The present paper discusses approaches for life cycle estimation and decision support in the concept phase of automotive engineering, especially focusing on the design engineer’s requirements. It includes an overview of current development processes and discusses by use of examples different approaches to integrate relevant information concerning sustainable product development in development processes.

Keywords

• sustainable product development
• technology management
• automotive industry
• early product development phases