Methods and Tools for the Development of Environmentally Sound Products

The development of environmentally sound products requires the consideration of processes and the emissions caused by the products throughout their entire life. Emissions must be determined during product design by simulating the whole product life in this stage. Methods and tools for this purpose, which are flexible and adaptable to industrial requirements, are developed within the Collaborative Research Center 392 (SFB392) at the Technical University in Darmstadt. This paper discusses requirements and approaches for the implementation for an integrated development tool for environmentally sound products. The topics include the motivation and need for such tools, requirements that are important for the application in industry and the attempt for a realization used in the SFB392. A prototype of such an integrated development tool based on object-oriented information modeling and CORBA architecture has been implemented within the SFB392. It is described in chapter 4. The content of this paper reflects the main points of the analysis stage for the next version of the product development environment