Life cycle sustainability assessment as a decision-making tool for the design of mechatronic systems

During the design process of mechatronic systems, several decisions are necessary for the optimisation of the final product. A decision support process is therefore needed to help in the choice of a satisfactory solution. In this paper, we propose an approach to integrate the performance criteria of the three sustainability dimensions in the design process of mechatronic systems. The proposed approach considers all lifecycle phases to prevent the phenomenon of impact transfer. It also uses a decision support method to assist the process of selection and calculation of different indicators for each alternative and the comparative analysis of the different investigated alternatives. The used research methodology starts with a literature review with the definition of specific LCSA methods followed by a prescriptive study establishing the process model and an empirical study on uses cases. The proposed approach is applied in a case study analysing two concepts of milk frother.