Axiomatic Design for the Development of Eco-Sustainable Metaproducts

The eco-design approach for new product development is becoming progressively more and more important for market and legislative reasons especially in advanced markets (EU USA, East Asia, etc.). This paper analyzes through Axiomatic Design (AD) the potential capability of the meta-product approach connected with the use of a tailored Smart Eco-design Platform, for the improvement of the eco-sustainability of products. The approach, proposed by the authors to eco-design, introduces the meta-product level (or Functional System level) as the reference level for detecting and developing the optimal design through the use of AD. The first axiom aims to define the Design Matrix of the Functional System in order to detect its best configuration. The purpose is to avoid an optimization without appropriate knowledge in terms of interaction meta-product-resources. Then the Functional Requirements definition, used in AD, could represent the ideal index for the ease of sharing information and knowledge on a wide scale among different industrial sectors. The development of the Smart Eco-design Platform could encourage the use of this approach in real product development. In this way it could be possible to develop a system of products with an overall higher level of eco-sustainability optimization, i.e. a system that needs less consumption of energy and material during all the products life cycles. A case study about the improvement of a functional system composed of a refrigerator and a kitchen cabinet is included in the present paper to explain clearly the proposed approach.