ABSTRACT
Designers no longer throw their finished product design “over the wall” to let manufacturing engineers deal with quality control. With increasing demands for pollution prevention and impending product take-back legislation, neither can they throw products over the wall for others to deal with environmental impacts. Planning for the management of life cycle environmental impacts calls for ever more precise control of each life cycle stage, ranging from raw material selection through manufacturing, customer use, disassembly, reuse, and recycling. This requires design engineers to employ more sophisticated and complex analytic approaches to concurrent engineering which integrate cost, quality, and environmental impacts. This chapter first describes a general, domainindependent mathematical model for design and manufacturing process analysis. Two examples illustrate the model. The first focuses on product design and the second on manufacturing process design, although the model can be used to analyze both concurrently. The first example addresses the pro-blem of product take-back requirements, proposing a multiple take-back and component reuse model for long-range product portfolio planning. The second example addresses machining processes and illustrates the effect of cost, quality, and environmental trade-offs in determining optimal dry and wet machining parameters.
