Decision Support Tools for Sustainable Manufacturing

Our vision is that of an integrated decision support solution that transforms the current time-consuming and reactive (post-design) sustainability assessment of a product into a proactive approach available in the early design phases. This solution called Sustainability Integrated into Early Design (SIED) will deliver lifecycle sustainability data into early design processes and focus primarily on the key area of target cascading, which does not exist for sustainability metrics, such as carbon footprint. The objective of this SBIR Phase 2 proposal is to extend our Phase 1 research and findings toward the development of a fully functional prototype that forms the basis of future commercialization. Phase 2 work focuses on developing specialized information representations and a set of procedures/algorithms fundamental to the working of this framework with significance focus on developing a fully functional prototype that will be deployed and tested at our industry collaborators.