INTERACTIVE VISUALIZATION FOR THE COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF LIFE CYCLES IN COMPLEX PRODUCT DESIGN
Harald E. Otto, Karl G. Mueller, Fuminobu KIMURA · 2003
A trend in engineering design is, that product models have significantly increased in detail in the past and this trend is likely to continue at even a higher rate in the future. This trend also includes data on the life cycle of a product, such as the direct and indirect inventory, costing data, production process data, consumer behavior data and others. If the available product data is to be used effectively to understand interconnection, consequences of decisions across many levels, then this data needs to be processed in a manner which supports humans cognitive abilities. It is therefore proposed to integrate visualization methods into a systematic LC data acquisition environment. This will be used for the comparative analysis based on (old or optimal) reference products or on thresholds checking the compliance to legal limits. A special class of interactive, three-dimensional geometrical objects, namely OM-Glyphs has been developed together with appropriate functions and mappings to represent LCI parameters and LC data of complex products within an interactive rendered three-dimensional information space. With this novel approach, newly introduced to LC related design analysis, activities such as evaluation of design parameter variations and their impact on the LCI and search for and analysis of patterns being either stable or affected, could be performed much easier, faster and efficient than with any traditional methods in this field currently available