Digitally integrated sustainability assessment of design characteristics - A systematic review

The optimization of a product design with regard to sustainability criteria requires a predictive assessment of the lifecycle-wide impact. This paper presents a Systematic Literature Review to explore the integration of sustainability assessments in product design. It highlights the lack of correlation between lifecycle assessment results and design characteristics (DC). To address the gap in current approaches, it proposes a conceptual architecture, which semantically connects design characteristics with lifecycle impacts throughout a lifecycle design schema, facilitating automated lifecycle assessment (LCA) and enhancing design optimization. Future research topics are presented which focus on developing the semantic representation and the implementation in an industrial use case.