Abstract
Life cycle design is indispensable for minimizing the environmental loads and costs through the whole product life cycle. In life cycle design, modular design is an important elemental technique to improve, e.g., maintainability, upgradability, reusability, and recyclability. It unifies components that go through the same path in the lifecycle flow and increases the efficiency in resource circulation. For representing this advantage, we introduce resource efficiency as an evaluative index for product modularity by employing the concept of eco-efficiency. For the evaluation, we formalize the probability that each module goes through preferable lifecycle paths designated by its lifecycle scenario. This paper also illustrates the prototype system that implements the proposed method and a case study of an ink-jet printer
