Life-cycle engineering seeks to incorporate various product life-cycle values into the early stages of design. These values include functional performance, manufacturability, serviceability, and environmental impact. We start with a survey of life-cycle engineering research focusing on methodologies and tools. Further, the paper addresses critical research issues in life-cycle design tools: design representation and measures for life-cycle evaluation. The paper describes our design representation scheme based on a semantic network that is effective for evaluating the structural layout. Evaluation measures for serviceability and recyclability illustrate the practical use of these representation schemes.
NDE and Design — A Unified Life-Cycle Engineering Approach