Green design assessing system model of products

Abstract

Green design and manufacturing is concerned with becoming the most important technology to realize sustainable development of manufacturing industry at present, but the lack of efficient evaluating tool to assess the environment impact of products' whole life cycle has become the bottleneck of green products' design and manufacturing technology. In addition, it can be found that most LCA tools cannot work together with disassembly analysis; as a result, the conclusions of LCA sometimes are unconvincing. In this paper, at first, a series of models were built to describe and analyse the life cycle environment impact of products, such as the function model of life cycle environment impact assessment system, products' life cycle process tree model, information describing model, and products' retirement decision simulation model, et al. In the information-describing model, by the use of object-oriented technology, it is convenient to define and describe the product life cycle environment characteristics. Moreover, in the retirement decision simulation model, directed graph theory was used to describe the complex product disassembly structure, and thus the disassembly sequence and disassembly depth can be easily obtained. Based on the above models, the assessment system integrates the disassembly/recycle assessment and life cycle assessment, and thus the evaluation result is more exact and practicable. Finally, a frame of green design decision supporting system was proposed. We are endeavoring to develop the software tool based on this frame.