CAD Assistant for Evaluating the Economic and Ecological Sustainability of Products

The greatest influence on the economic and ecological sustainability of a product can be exerted in the early stages of product development. However, limited knowledge about the product makes it difficult to make decisions based on a solid data base. For this purpose, it is required to provide the necessary information for an economic and ecological evaluation as well as decision support during the design in the CAD system. This raises the question of how a sustainability assessment for the raw material and production phase can be carried out based on a 3D CAD model and the requirements for a part. For this purpose, this paper presents a methodology to generate feasible and assessable material and manufacturing process chain combinations. Furthermore, a methodology for automatic economic and ecological evaluation of the 3D CAD model is implemented. The result is a CAD assistant that enables decisions to be made directly within the CAD system based on economic and ecological criteria. A suitable database structure is developed to provide the necessary information. The CAD assistant is then demonstrated with two case studies, which show the possibilities of the developed tool.