Life Cycle Engineering for Materials and Technology Selection: Two Models, One Approach

Under the umbrella of Life Cycle Engineering several engineering branches provide different approaches for industrial sustainable development and/or for modeling engineering analysis for decision-support on products design and materials/technology selection. The differences are mainly on the dimensions of analysis, i.e., environmental, economic, technical and/or social and on the scope of the analysis, namely cradle to grave or cradle to cradle. In this paper we discuss several approaches developed by the authors, providing a roadmap to guide designers to choose the most suitable for a specific problem. Case studies are presented to illustrate several types of applications and possible outputs of life cycle analyses.