Abstract
Life cycle design is a promising approach to minimize environmental load and resource consumption throughout the entire product life cycle. One of the main design targets in life cycle design is "the balance of resource circulation," which is a critical issue about quality and quantity of products, components, and other resources in the life cycle especially for solving how to utilize resources of products. While designing products and their life cycles across multiple generations has a wider range of potential to utilize the resources effectively, such multi-generational design makes it more critical and difficult to solve the circulation balance than designing single product life cycle. The objective of this research is to propose a support method for designing balance of resource circulation across multi-generational product life cycles. For this purpose, this paper proposes representational scheme for multi-generational product life cycles. This scheme consists of four models. Two models represent design information of multi-generational products and their life cycle flows, respectively. Based on these models, the other models represent state of products and their components through their life cycles and their amount distribution in each life cycle process. This method employs life cycle simulation technique to estimate their state and amount.
