How MBSE Helps Design Sustainable Products

Global challenges fuel an increasing demand for sustainable products, necessitating a shift towards environmentally conscious practices. Escalating concerns about climate change, resource depletion, and environmental degradation urgently demand that we reevaluate and redesign our approach to product development.

Products lacking sustainability considerations contribute to these issues, prompting a critical reexamination of manufacturing processes and product life cycles. Beyond ethical and environmental considerations, the growing demand from consumers for eco-friendly choices, along with evolving regulations, highlights the economic and strategic advantages of adopting sustainability concepts.

The bottom line is that the transition to more sustainable products is essential to promote environmental resilience, meet consumer expectations, comply with regulations, and ensure the long-term viability of industries and societies.

Keeping Track of Interdependencies with MBSE

There are multiple criteria for evaluating and optimizing resource usage in the production of goods. However, improving one aspect without considering others may harm the overall sustainability of the product. The negative effects can outweigh the positive ones. For example, designing a lightweight product with energy-intensive, non-locally sourced, or less durable materials can have negative consequences.

To develop an effective sustainability strategy, various dimensions within an overall context must be evaluated. The product’s structure and the processes used to create it form the common denominator of all the different options.

This is adding another layer of complexity to already increasingly complex products calling for more sophisticated engineering efforts, which can be achieved through a model-based systems engineering approach.

Quick Wins with MBSE in Sustainable Product Development

Sustainable product development is becoming a critical aspect affecting the architecture of products. Considering sustainability in the overall context of all efforts for product success, MBSE plays a critical role in providing this context. If product decisions can be made with sustainability aspects as an integral part of the product model, quick wins can be achieved.

If a sustainability strategy has been implemented in the product architecture, and if the sustainability criteria are linked to the functional and physical elements of the product architecture, then the most effective levers in terms of “sustainability hotspots” become visible when translating architectures into models. Companies with well-structured product architectures can achieve quick and effective results through a model-based approach.

For example, the carbon footprint can be added as an attribute to an existing product structure, using parameters such as transport routes for purchased parts, materials and material properties, or energy consumption in component manufacture.

So, are quick results not possible without a previously established product architecture? Scenarios are conceivable in which initial steps toward sustainability are nevertheless possible. A suitable starting point is requirements engineering.

A structured consideration of market and customer requirements can be carried out and evaluated in a model. The resulting transparency can show in individual cases that positive, but yet unidentified, sustainable differentiating features of the company’s own products already exist. These can then become effective in competition as product advantages in the sense of sustainability.

Both the market and regulations and laws formulate sustainability-related requirements. For product planning, it is therefore necessary to anticipate these requirements and to map them into the functions of the product in good time Managing multiple sets of requirements libraries in MBSE applications like Zuken Genesys is a critical capability.

Explore Genesys

Conclusion

The push for sustainable products arises from the urgent need to tackle global challenges like climate change and resource depletion. As highlighted, MBSE helps sustainable product design by providing a holistic view and considering interdependencies in resource usage.

Incorporating sustainability into models not only increases transparency but also enables quick wins in sustainable product development. Companies can achieve fast, effective results in promoting environmental resilience and meeting consumer expectations through MBSE, with structured product architectures or requirements engineering.