LCA and LCC Data Semantics Sharing across Product Lifecycle Processes

Product sustainability approaches, such as life cycle assessment (LCA) and life cycle costing (LCC), are becoming increasingly critical to influence product decisions tor all lifecycle stages. However, LCA and LCC methods must be integrated into the product lifecycle processes for sharing their data semantics with other applications in order to support decisions in the technical, ecological and economic aspects of products. Semantics sharing has raised big challenges in understanding and interpreting the intended meaning of LCA, LCC and other product data. This paper presents an ontology-driven, standard-based approach to the explicit capture and reuse of product data semantics for heterogeneous information sharing across lifecycle processes in computer aided design, quality assurance, LCA and LCC analysis, and product development process management. The approach incorporates object-based product data modeling, interoperability standardization, and ontology engineering to address the product data semantics sharing issues. A software implementation of the approach with a use scenario is also discussed in the paper.