Developing Integrated Sustainable Product-‐Process-‐Service Systems at the Early Product Design Stages
Abstract
The paper describes a systematic approach that aims to foster the development of sustainable integrated systems of products and services since the very early phases of conceptual design. The procedure helps the designer in redesigning a product (as well as the related processes and services) to reduce its overall impacts. The method takes into account environmental, social and economic aspects concerning a wide range of stakeholders.
The approach adopts the Functional Analysis methodology, which is used to: (i) characterize the product (either an artifact or a service) as an integrated product-process-service system; (ii) identify the design analogies with existing products in order to identify the similarities in terms of sustainability impacts. The improved design concept, along with the related environmental, economic and societal characteristics, is used as a starting point for the successive detailed design. A case study illustrates the method and proposes a redesign of the product-process-service for a pram.
Keywords: Sustainability; LCA; Functional Analysis; Design by analogy; Radical Innovation; Needs analysis
1. Introduction and State of the art
Research in the field of eco-design has reached a certain maturity. In last two decades a high number of tools and methods for designing sustainable products and services and assessing their environmental impacts have been proposed. There is now a strong need to understand how to overcome the weaknesses of existing solutions as well as to find the best way to match them in more integrated and effective solutions. The present paper is a contribution towards that end.
An introduction of the research areas involved in the presented approach will help the reader to understand the meaning of the adopted solutions. In particular the research involves the areas of: environmental impacts assessment (Life Cycle Assessment in particular); tools for products Eco-Design; Methods for sustainable design of product-service systems. Functional analysis is finally introduced as the backbone of the presented approach.
1.1 Life cycle assessment
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a structured approach that aims to assess the potential environmental impacts and resources consumption throughout a product (good or service) lifecycle (Finnveden et al., 2009). Despite successful implementations of the tool, several weaknesses are still far to be solved. Firstly, many practical approaches focuses only on manufacturing and part of the use stages, while several researches highlight the need to concentrate on the total life cycle stages from pre-manufacturing to post-use (Badurdeen et al., 2010; Jaafar et al., 2007; Jawahir et al., 2006). In relation to this, further issues need to be addressed: (i) time and knowledge necessity; (ii) input data availability; (iii) input data consistency; and (iv) early design stage applicability.
Time and knowledge necessity
It has been widely demonstrated that the amount of time and costs needed for an effective Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) is a critical issue, especially for SMEs (Masoni at al., 2002), that have to face also with the lack of both data availability and internal know how for performing an effective inventory. An interesting approach conceived to deal with the need of time and the high level of knowledge requested by traditional Process-LCA are the Input-Output LCA (IO-LCA) models. Based on the well-known Input-Output Analysis (IOA) born in the field of economics (Leontief, 1936), such methods aims to “evaluate the environmental interventions generated throughout the upstream supply-chain to deliver a certain amount of different goods and services” (Finnveden et. al., 2009) by means of Input-Output Tables (IOT) typically defined for an average product within a particular sector. In order to reduce the high approximation of IO-LCA results, Hybrid LCA (Moriguchi et. al., 1993) have been developed. With this method, the practitioner combines Process-LCA and IO-LCA, using the former for a comprehensive analysis of the main process and the latter for an approximated evaluation of the farer flows linked to the main process.
Input Data Availability
As mentioned above, the request for data in LCA is very high and the lack of data inevitably leads to restrictions or even errors in final results. Despite many databases are being developed in order to fulfill such a lack of data, a lot of work is still needed. The main issues related to LCA Databases, especially IO Databases, are the need of more completeness of impacts data as well as their full and free accessibility. If the quality of data is getting higher thanks to worldwide progresses in this field, the problem of data accessibility is still far to be solved. Most consistent systems such as Ecoinvent (www.ecoinvent.org) and Simapro (www.simapro.co.uk) are proprietary and allow just trial versions free of charge, as well as CEDA (www.climateearth.com), that provides a specific version for academic organizations. EIO-LCA (www.eiolca.net) is a free tool, although its applicability is limited to IO-LCA field, with the issue of high processes aggregation. Some attempts are being made in order to develop a free and comprehensive tool that would allow a full access by every user, as well as a consistent set of IO data from many different countries. This is, for example, the aim of International Reference Life Cycle Data System (ILCD) (Wolf et al., 2012). A recent effort by United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) has been the publication of a set of guidance principles for the development of consistent, high quality and fully accessible LCA databases (UNEP, 2011).
Input Data Consistency
Another critical need to be met is surely the necessity of a consistent set of data and information provided by companies and researchers, and validated by experts, that will allow to meet both transparency and cost/time reduction for further LCA analyses. The projects presented above still lack in this aspect. An already proposed solution is a crowsourcing approach where the economy maps itself while research institutions offer their support and highlight bad assumptions, so that companies that perform weak analysis can be able to understand the problems and then fix their own datasets or production processes (Andrews, 2009). Besides the obvious environmental benefits for the planet, such participating approach would also allow an improvement of companies image and a drastic costs reduction to perform the analysis, as the data collected would be reused by everyone who need them, as well as a worldwide raise of everyone’s knowledge and awareness about sustainability issues.
Early Design Stage Applicability
The need of transparency of information and data consistency goes hand in hand with another, perhaps more pressing, issue. This is the necessity of an appropriate framework for designing products and services that would allow introducing sustainability requirements straight from the conceptual phase, without overlooking all the other needs of “traditional” stakeholders and according to the well-known necessity of time-to-market reduction. The need for a different way to conceive sustainable design comes from the following consideration: the awareness of the importance of tools like LCA, especially for reaching voluntary environmental labels (e.g., EU EcoLabels), combined with the above mentioned weaknesses of such method, often leads to a simple “certification ritualism” performed both by businesses and consultants in order to meet binding or voluntary requirements. Thus, the risk is a low consideration for results completeness or at least a reduction of the potentially achievable environmental benefits. As a consequence, LCA often becomes just an ex-post tool, that assesses products environmental impacts only after the main design choices have been performed. Such a behavior also undermines the credibility of sustainability tools in design.
1.2 Tools for Products Eco-Design
The challenge for reaching sustainable production and consumption in the early future has been accepted in various research areas. Concerning the field of eco-design and product life cycle management, many research works have been presented in last decade in order to develop greener products and services (Russo et al., 2014). Maxwell et al. (2006) classified existing approaches for developing sustainable products and services basing on five possible goals that can be achieved: (a) Improving TBL (Triple Bottom Line) sustainability (Elkington, 1998) performance of industry; (b) Improving the environmental performance of industry; (c) Developing products with reduced environmental impact; (d) Shift to system focus; (e) Developing sustainable products and services.
In addition, in order to develop products with reduced environmental impact, Russo (2011) detailed four action levels: (1) Existing product improvement; (2) Existing product redesign; (3) New product concept definition; (4) New production system definition. While various tools for later-stage design have been successfully implemented in the industry (Russo et al., 2011), there is still a remarkable lack of research behind the definition and application of eco-design approaches in early design stages (i.e. the third goal), despite the potential of radical innovation from conceptual design is vast. The focus on sustainability from the beginning of the design process allows to reach more favorable environmental, social and market performances, with a better comprehension and translation of all stakeholders’ needs and product/service functionalities required. Oehlberg et al. (2009) explored such aspect in the field of human-centered product design.
1.3 Towards Integrated Product-Service Systems
New business opportunities, demand for products dematerialization, new channels provided by the internet, are some examples of reasons why industry from many different fields is rapidly moving toward the design of artifacts and services together. This paradigm is widely known as Product Service System (PSS), that can be defined as a marketable set of products and services capable of jointly fulfilling a user’s need. The product/service ratio in this set can vary, either in terms of function fulfillment or economic value (Goedkoop et al., 1999). In addition the design of new product-service systems may involve the development or use of ‘eco-efficient’ products that are more efficient in their use of energy and materials and generate less pollution and waste (Roy, 2000). Among the various attempts to better characterize the concept of PSS, Sustainable Product and Service Development (SPSD) (Maxwell et al., 2006) is a remarkable approach that starts from the function to be provided in order to understand whether a product, a service or a PSS is the best solution to achieve TBL (Triple Bottom Line) sustainability criteria.
Nevertheless, many aspects concerning early stage innovation for sustainability still need to be deepen. In particular, the issues presented above in relation with LCA and Eco-design tools need to be faced to reach effective and systematic applications of methods for radical eco-innovation in industry and service fields.
The paper presents a novel design framework based on Functional Analysis (FA), that aims to achieve a quick and effective overall environmental assessment of the analyzed product/service concept, and a consistent definition of the optimal Product-Process-Service (PPS) system that best fulfil stakeholders and users’ needs as well as environmental sustainability criteria. Such perspective is in accordance with the well-known TBL view.
1.4 Functional Analysis
FA represents a useful tool in product design process. Over the past decades several standardized representation of product functionalities have been developed (Pahl and Beitz, 1984; Sasajima et al., 1996; Umeda et al., 1995). Such approaches represent the product through functions linked in a causal chain by the flows, which are the actors involved in the action described by the function. The series of functions and flows are often graphically organized in the so-called Functional maps or Functional flow block diagrams. Functions are expressed by verb+flow couples. Hirtz et al. (2001) developed a standardized function-related terminology set in order to obtain standardized representations of functions. Concerning the flows, there are three kinds of flows involved in the global functioning of a product: material, energy or signal (Pahl and Beitz, 1984). FA allows to translate the user needs into product requirements since the conceptual design phase. Yu et al. (1998), for instance, approached product architectures from a functional perspective by defining the architecture based on customer demands.
Design tools grounded on FA can support sustainable design of products. Bryant et al. (2004) elaborated a redesign technique based on relationships between products functional modules and assemblies, quantifying redesign potentials through the application of an Elimination Preference Index metric.
The paper aims to achieve, also thanks to the potentialities of FA, the following goals:
· A comprehensive design of a sustainable integrated product-process-service system (PPS);
· A preliminary environmental assessment of the analyzed PPS concept;
· An effective individuation and selection of the most critical stakeholders to be satisfied, mainly in terms of environmental benefits;
· A preliminary business strategy, consistent to the system designed.
2. THE METHOD
The method presented is a top-down framework for sustainable product/services development based on FA, that is the basis for the Sustainability Assessment by Analogy: an approach for performing an estimation of the overall environmental impacts potentially due to the design concept. The product in particular is seen, independently of its nature, as a PPS system: an integrated system of Product(s), Process(es) and Service(s) involved throughout the whole lifecycle. For identifying the key information necessary to the analysis the authors refer to an ontology known as FBS (Function-Behavior-State) (Gero and Kannengiesser, 2002; Umeda et al., 1995) and its evolutions (Cascini et al., 2010). According to such ontology a system can be abstracted and decomposed into:
- Needs: the exigencies from where the existence of the artifact is originated;
- Scenes: homogeneous groups of phases belonging to the same life cycle stage (Hayes, 1979);
- Phases: homogeneous set of functions belonging to/performed by the same components and characterized by the same physics/chemistry/logics (Gabelloni et. al. 2011);
- Functions: the result of the user’s interpretative process about the product’s physical behaviours conditioned by the goal that the user himself wants to achieve by using the product (Fantoni, 2011);
- Behaviours: the way the physical and chemical state of the product evolves in time and in its environment;
- States: “a property at an instant of time of a system (and environment), that is involved in an interaction between a system and its environment. As a consequence of an interaction [behaviour], the property of a system (and environment) changes (i.e. state change)” Umeda et al., 1995);
- Features: the specific characteristics of a single part of the product, in terms of its geometrical entities as well as properties of the material it is made of, etc. (Gabelloni et. al. 2011).