An Integrated Decision Support Framework for Sustainability CAE

The objective of this proposal is to establish the feasibility of developing an integrated decision support framework that transforms the current time-consuming and reactive (post completion of final design) sustainability assessment into a proactive CAE approach that enables the ability to revise designs based on performance against selected sustainability targets in the product design process, i.e., enables design optimization for sustainability. This framework, called Sustainability CAE (SCAE) will leverage the latest advancements in open standards and software capabilities, capture lifecycle-wide information relevant to sustainability and its assessment and organize and integrate it in a usable form with the analysis phases. In this phase 1 project, we shall focus on: (a) requirements analysis to determine the constituents of information for CAE analysis, (b) the formalization of integrated data models to describe how data should be stored, linked, and accessed and interoperated with design activities, and (c) a proof of concept prototype for the demonstration of the utility of the information model for CAE with goal of analyzing sustainability.