Digital integration of total lifecycle tools for sustainable product design

To promote sustainable manufacturing it is imperative that closed-loop material flows are considered during sustainable product design. The usefulness of various sustainable product design decision support tools depends on the ability to access accurate data related to the different lifecycle stages. The importance of digitally integrating disparate data sources and the potential for using digital threads to facilitate integration has been widely discussed. However, the approach to develop such digitally integrated capabilities is lacking in extant literature. This paper presents the development of an interoperable digital thread to integrate data from different sources across the total lifecycle interfaced with a suite of decision support tools. The application of the digitally integrated capability is demonstrated using an industrial case study. Results demonstrate the effectiveness of the digital thread to acquire data from different lifecycle stages and to conduct sustainability performance analyses to help identify the most sustainable product configuration designs.