Simulating Life Cycles of Individual Products for Life Cycle Design

Minimizing environmental loads and resource consumption is a major issue in the manufacturing industry while enhancing value of products. Individual products have a variety of states depending on their life cycle histories even if they are produced from the same design information. While design information represents their ‘nominal information’ specified by designers, we call a specific state of an individual product as ‘entity information.’ The differences in individual products make it instable in terms of the states and quantity to circulate resources and to deliver service activities at the after sales market. To realize efficient resource circulation and high quality services, designers should determine nominal information of a product and of its life cycle flow by analyzing the entity information at its design stage. This paper proposes a method for modeling both nominal information of a product life cycle and the entity information. This method represents the nominal information with product model and life cycle flow model. In this paper, we define a model of the entity information, which shows states of individual products and the number of the products in each life cycle process such as maintenance, collection, and end-of-life treatments. To create this model, we derive entity information throughout the entire life cycle flow by using life cycle simulation technique. A case study of a smart phone is illustrated for demonstrating the feasibility of the proposed modeling method.