Material-Flow Modeling for Design for Environment

Design paradigm exactly addresses the higher-level design issues where the implementation field (mechanical, electrical etc.) of the product is left for later stages. Once the general design problem is understood, better products will be emerging; especially products requiring a cooperation of various engineering-field components are a bigger concern. The idea is that design is a phenomenon, cutting across all disciplines, having its own characteristics (Tanik and Ertas, 1992). The proposed front-end will ideally allow for a top-down design of a complex artifact, freeing the designers of implementation-level details. Such a front end will be a powerful tool, if connected seamlessly to existing CAD and CASE tools. This study brings forward a front-end, allowing the inclusion of the MLC related specifications into an engineering design. The output of this front-end is conceptually at the input level of the existing tools. If successfully integrated, the outcome will be a tool representing the artifact in a spectrum of levels starting with the idea forming and stretching to material or dimension details. 3.2. Representing the MLC Considerations The introduced MLC model involves a system of manufacture units, which feed materials -scrapped or freshto each other. Manufacture boxes and material flows model such a system. Manufacture units accept materials as input and transform materials at outputs. A manufacture unit may produce desiredmaterial, by-products, or waste. The components of this MLC model are shown in Figure 2; boxes represent manufacture units and links represent material flows. The boxes have inputs on the left, representing raw material, outputs on the right for desired products, further outputs on top and in the bottom modeling the by-products or waste material. Figure 3 illustrates an example for Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) lifecycle related flows. Some of the production-process have to be represented at the design time. Luckily Abstract Design Paradigm does not engage with the traditional phased approach where a higher level activity is completely de-coupled from an immediate lower level. Rapid Prototyping ideas suggest softer boundaries and feedback. Therefore, the capability in the previous tools to represent lower level properties is utilized, and extended to represent material requirements and process primitives. System Specification Decomposition Component Specification, Search, Modification, Creation Integration System Time