SBIR-STTR Award

The objective of this proposal is to establish the feasibility of developing an integrated decision support tool that transforms the current time-consuming and reactive (post-design) sustainability assessment into a real-time, proactive approach available in the early phases of product design. This tool, called Sustainability Integrated into Early Design (SIED), will define and capture lifecycle-wide information relevant to sustainability and its assessment, and make it available in the product design phase. The availability of this information in a timely and accurate manner, in turn, will enable the development of value-added, vertically specialized tools for activities such as material usage monitoring, energy monitoring and recyclability analysis. In this phase I project, we shall focus on: 1. Requirement analysis to determine the constituents of information that need to be managed 2. Formalization of integrated data models to describe how data should be stored, linked and accessed 3. Proof of concept prototype to demonstrate feasibility and use in decision-making. Commercial Applications: By integrating sustainability target and status information with the existing product creation and business process information using open standards, the SIED tool will deliver a one-stop access to structured, real-time information. This project aims to rectify all of the technical and data standard hurdles currently experienced by the automotive OEMs and their supply chain. The biggest beneficiaries are the Tier 1, 2, and 3 suppliers, who will have a good understanding of what data to provide the OEMs and in what format. This project will be an efficiency gain to the suppliers, since all the OEMs can use a standard data model, which eliminates translation/re-transmission of their data to each OEM independently. Once the data has a place to be stored and managed, we are also developing tools to deliver the data via existing commercial applications to decision makers in a transparent and seamless interface. This will ensure that sustainability and other metrics are given their due importance in product development, which will make compliance to regulations more robust and eliminate costly re-design

Our vision is that of an integrated decision support solution that transforms the current time-consuming and reactive (post-design) sustainability assessment of a product into a proactive approach available in the early design phases. This solution called Sustainability Integrated into Early Design (SIED) will deliver lifecycle sustainability data into early design processes and focus primarily on the key area of target cascading, which does not exist for sustainability metrics, such as carbon footprint. The objective of this SBIR Phase 2 proposal is to extend our Phase 1 research and findings toward the development of a fully functional prototype that forms the basis of future commercialization. Phase 2 work focuses on developing specialized information representations and a set of procedures/algorithms fundamental to the working of this framework with significance focus on developing a fully functional prototype that will be deployed and tested at our industry collaborators. Commercial Applications: By integrating sustainability target and status information with the existing product creation and business process information using open standards, the SIED tool will deliver a one-stop access to structured, real-time information. BIMCON will develop products in the area of Bill of Material and Attribute Management tools (including sustainability), which will be commercialized. These products are: Sustainability Decision Tools, the standard portable BOM, and corresponding Integration Tools. Once that data has a place to be stored and managed, we are also developing tools to deliver the data via existing commercial applications to decision makers in a transparent and seamless interface. This will ensure that sustainability and other metrics are given their due importance in product development, which will make compliance to regulations more robust and eliminate costly re-design