Early sustainability assessment to design competitive industrial systems

Nowadays industrial system design has to face a big issue: offering new advanced functionalities, guaranteeing high performances, respecting the competitive pressure, limiting the environmental impact, expanding the company’s market share, being usable and easy to control. In a nutshell, they have to be sustainable in respect with planet, profit and people. In this context, Design for Sustainability (D4S) promotes a sustainable design practice, where all impacts are considered and optimized. However, D4S methods usually focus on one single aspect at a time (e.g. eco-design addresses environmental issues, ergonomics investigates physical human-product interaction, etc.). In practice, industrial systems design requires numerous aspects to be integrated and optimized contemporarily and interactively: mechanics, electronics, system control, management of material and information flows, human-machine interface, human-product interaction, as well as impacts on environment, costs and human factors. The present research proposes an analytical approach for an early sustainability assessment based on a set of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) considering the three aspects of sustainability (environment, cost and humans) and a feature-based approach, to support their easy and preventive analysis.