lntegrating Life Cicle Aspects Within Product Family Design: An Example for SMEs H.E. Otto, K.G. Mueller and F. Kimura Dept. of Precision Engineering, The University of Tokyo Bunkyo-ku, Hongo 7-3-1, Tokyo 113-8656, JAPAN tel. +81-3-5841-6495 -fax. +81-3-3812-8849 e-mail: [otto,kmueller,kimura}@cim.pe. u-tokyo. acjp M. Germani and F. Mandorli Department of Mechanical Engineering, The University of Ancona Via Brecce Bianche, Ancona /-60131, ITALY tel.: +39-71-2204969- fax.: +39-71-2204801 e-mail: germani@popcsi. unian.it, ferro@ied.unipr. it Abstract: Recent concern for the environment and high competition in globalized markets pose eminent requirements to the producing industry, including small and medium sized enterprises. Envisioned goals of a eco-design combined with a drastical reduction of product development time and increase of customized features of products require new strategies and tools. One solution subject to international investigation is the development of modular products. This approach we enhance by integrating life cycle assessment. Work done in this field was concentrated on developing methods to define either a product's platform architecture or relationships between product modules and documented customer needs within the design analysis of product families. Unfortunately, all of these approaches failed to include a framework to enable also the integration of life cycle assessment. Within the scope of the work described in this paper, we target fundamental problems within the design of product families regarding the integration of life cycle assessment and economic application of information technology, suitable in terms of cost and performance for small and medium sized enterprises. The application field, where first case studies were undertaken and real product models implemented was within the design of parallel-shaft speed reducers. Keywords: product family design, eco design, life cycle inventory parameters, life cycle assessment 1 INTRODUCTION Life cycle assessment (LCA) is becoming increasingly more important as an assessment tool within the design process. LCA may be used in an attempt to minimize certain environmental impacts of a design during the whole life cycle, and as a result weak points and areas requiring special attention of a design are highlighted. The downside of LCA is that a large amount of data is required. The data is difficult to assemble alone due to the volume and even requires periodical updates, which makes LCA relatively expensive. The cost of carrying out an LCA can often not be justified in small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs ), since The original version of this chapter was revised: The copyright line was incorrect. This has been corrected. The Erratum to this chapter is available at DOI: 10.1007/978-0-387-35492-7_50 © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2002 G. L. Kovács et al. (eds.), Digital Enterprise Challenges