Making process systems engineering decisions that are ecologically conscious requires analysis of both industrial and ecological processes. Traditional methods in process engineering usually fall short of meeting this requirement due to considering the environment as secondary to economic objectives. Life cycle assessment and design methods have broadened the scope of traditional methods by con...

Research and experience show that decisions in the early stages of the whole product life cycle, which means conceptual decision of a product’s Life Cycle Scenario (LCS), play an important role in the Life Cycle Cost (LCC), performance, reliability, and environmental impact. This paper describes how to generate and evaluate product life cycle scenarios. The Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP)...

Life cycle assessment is a technique to assess environmental aspects associated with a product or process by identifying energy, materials, and emissions over its life cycle. The energy analysis includes four stages of a life cycle: material production phase, manufacturing phase, use phase, and end-of-life phase. In this study, the life cycle energy of fiber-reinforced composites manufactured b...

number: 002-0302) The article deals with the decision problem faced when a firm is producing items with different life cycles, and/or in different cycle phases. Then, deciding on a Manufacturing Strategy (MS) becomes especially difficult, because usually different manufacturing processes are considered optimum for different products. An analysis of the suitable manufacturing process can result ...

The commercial availability of resources and preliminary products is of essential importance for the industry. One aim of manufacturing companies is to know about structural dependencies in the availability of resources along the entire value chain of their products and to also not only know about environmental impacts of a product but also to have information about the economic life cycle and ...

This paper discusses the incorporation of modularization into mechanical designs. The research uses a definition of modularity that incorporates the potential of modularity based not only on the form/function structure of a product but also life-cycle processes such as manufacture, assembly, service, and recycling. Modularization, due to the functional independence it creates, has been called t...

This study presents an introduction to mass customization in the product life cycle—the goal of mass customization, mass customization configurations, and new customer integration techniques, modular design techniques, flexible manufacturing systems (FMSs), and supply chain management methods. The study reviews three selected books and twenty-one selected papers—early papers that describe the g...