Development of energy-efficient products: Models, methods and IT support

The article proposes an IT system for product development that integrates product structures, digital product models, and methods that incorporate concerns for energy efficiency. The entire product development process is based on a property-driven design approach that is adapted to a design considering energy efficiency. By an energy-oriented target costing, energy design goals as well as costs can be controlled. The integration of product models including information about energy consumption can be achieved by a system ontology. The IT system proposed combines an enterprise application architecture with workflow modeling and management to support product development processes taking energy efficiency into account.