Sustainable design synthesis for product environmental footprints

Product design has a profound impact on product environmental footprints in its life cycle. This paper is devoted to a systematic functional state space-based methodology for sustainable design synthesis under the product environmental footprints consideration. After the functional representation model is proposed, the product environmental footprints and the procedure of product environmental footprints assessment are introduced. Functional state space for sustainable design synthesis integrated with product environmental footprints is then set up. Design prototype-based knowledge representation of solutions is also discussed. The sustainable design synthesis approach based on functional state space is then put forward in detail. The sustainable design synthesis of devices for decreasing resistance of an offshore platform is used to demonstrate the proposed methodology. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.