Knowledge-based integrated product design framework towards sustainable low-carbon manufacturing
Introduction
With the increasing pressure to climate change, the manufactured products are responsible for a significant portion of energy-related greenhouse gases and energy consumption, and implementing low-carbon manufacturing has been gaining substantial interests from manufacturing industry [1], [2], [3]. Due to the fact that the great majority of the carbon emission for a product is determined at the design stage of its lifecycle, it is of tremendous significance to develop effective low-carbon product design methods for improving the product environmental performance [4], [5].
In general, the low-carbon product design methodologies are used to create product alternatives with reduced carbon footprint, which can provide the stipulated guidelines for manufacturing firms to utilize the energy and raw material in a resource-efficient way [6]. When carrying out the low-carbon product design, product designers need to go through continuous interaction between problem definition space and solution generation space by empirical exploration and decision-making, so as to coordinate the complex conflicts in joint consideration of environmental impact, enterprise benefit and product functionability. Such an iterative design process is reasonably time-consuming, and sometimes makes designers feel difficult due to the limited environmental knowledge and design experience. With this in mind, how to design the appropriate alternatives of low-carbon products for maximizing the stakeholders’ benefits in a cost- and time-effective manner is a critical challenge [7], [8].
Designers’ navigation and exploration in the multi-disciplinary design space will be inefficient and unreasonable if unguided by principles and knowledge. With the introduction of the key strengths of computers, viz. processing speed, storage capacity and network connectivity, developing knowledge-based support tools for low-carbon product design is a promising manner to cope with above issue [9], [10]. The integration of knowledge-based tools into low-carbon product design can enable the heuristic search of past design experience and knowledge and the quantitative analysis of many potential optimized solutions to provide smart decision support. Furthermore, the utilization of the knowledge-based tools can support the creation, transfer and use of specific knowledge with regard to carbon emission to expedite the realization of eco-design.
Accordingly, lots of effective approaches and tools of low-carbon product design have been proposed from different perspectives. Nonetheless, it is necessary to point out that there are still some limitations in any of the cited work. On the one hand, the current low-carbon product design methodologies are applied to a limited extent and tend to solve specific low-carbon problems such as low-carbon design process modelling, carbon footprint estimation and low-carbon optimization [11], [12], [13]. The low-carbon product design is a complex solution procedure that needs to consider the conflict objectives containing functional needs and low-carbon constraints. The generated design solution with the better low-carbon performance may not be adoptable for customers. There is still a lack of a holistic framework to guide developers to make a trade-off between product functional space and low-carbon solution space. On the other hand, the existing knowledge-based product design approaches mainly focus on the knowledge modelling and knowledge organization [14], [15], and how to use product knowledge for facilitating low-carbon design space navigation is still least supported.
To overcome the limitations of prior approaches, this paper proposes a knowledge-based integrated low-carbon product design framework to determine the product solutions considering multiple design principles. The novelty of this paper lies in its knowledge-based hierarchical low-carbon framework and mathematical model for the optimal design solution selection in coordination with the stakeholders’ benefits. In comparison with the existing researches, our work makes three distinctive contributions.
- (1)
A knowledge-based hierarchical low-carbon framework is established by encompassing function-based local synthesis and low-carbon global optimization, so as to coordinate the complex conflicts between product function and low-carbon issue.
- (2)
A hybrid low-carbon product design approach integrating CBR, PSO and TOPSIS is proposed to determine the optimal product solution, which can guide designers explore the design space effectively.
- (3)
To enhance the product performance, a multi-objective mathematical model with low-carbon metric, customer satisfaction and manufacturing cost is presented for effective coordination of all stakeholders.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 reviews the related work. Section 3 represents the problem description of the low-carbon product design and makes some assumptions. Section 4 proposes the knowledge-based integrated low-carbon product design framework, which is defined as the following four steps: ontology-based knowledge representation, function-structure synthesis, low-carbon product optimization, and the best-fit solution selection. A case study about low-carbon product design of hydraulic machine is provided in Section 5 to verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Finally, Section 6 concludes this paper and discusses about the future research plans.
Section snippets
Literature review
This section is closely divided into two parts. The one subsection describes the research situation of the low-carbon product design, and the other subsection introduces the knowledge-based support tools for design.
Problem formulation
Low-carbon product design can be considered as the integration of low carbon issue and product design theory, and it is where most of the crucial decisions are made that affect the carbon emissions and product performance. In the low-carbon product design process, designers usually follow the specific path consist of the fundamental cognitive activities: low-carbon and functional requirements analysis, search and optimization for the potential alternatives, and the evaluation of the best
Knowledge-based integrated low-carbon product design framework
In order to facilitate the exploration and acquisition of optimal low-carbon product solutions, this section divides the low-carbon product design framework into the following four steps: ontology-based knowledge representation, function-structure synthesis, low-carbon product optimization, and the best-fit solution selection. More specially, ontology-based knowledge representation is used to formalize the multi-view product information involving carbon footprint, manufacturing cost, and
Case study
To validate the proposed integrative framework of low-carbon product design, this section takes hydraulic machine as a case study. Hydraulic machine is a kind of complex manufacturing equipment in industry which utilizes hydraulic transmission technology to process nonmetals or metals, and it is widely applied to many fields such as hot pressing and sheet stamping. With the development direction to large-tonnage, the low-carbon design has attracted more and more attention, and product
Conclusions
This paper presents a knowledge-based integrative framework for low-carbon product design by which designers can create an eco-friendly product with the computer aided support. The main contributions of this research can be summarized as the following two aspects. On the one hand, an integrated product design framework considering carbon emission and knowledge-based design process is proposed to formalize the stepwise low-carbon product design. On the other hand, some intelligent technologies
Funding
This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 51805472, 51975386), the Zhejiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. LGG21E050003, LZ21E050004) and Open Foundation of the State Key Laboratory of Fluid Power and Mechatronic Systems.
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
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