A Variability Model for Individual Life Cycle Paths in Life Cycle Engineering

Life cycle properties are becoming increasingly important for the success of a product. They are determined during development, but their impact—and thus value—only becomes apparent in later life cycle phases. Life cycle engineering is concerned with designing such product properties in early stages of design. However, the life cycle paths of individual products from the same product type increasingly diverge, due to differing product usage, personalization and software or hardware updates. The expected and realized value of certain life cycle properties might vary greatly within the same type of product. Thus, this paper addresses how such individual life cycle paths can be made accessible to product system designers in the context of LCE, to evaluate and determine valuable life cycle properties. A meta model is developed to describe divergent life cycle paths of individual products and investigate, how to identify the possible, future life cycle paths in early stages of design and how to incorporate them in LCE. The approach is applied to the design of a door panel for passenger cars. Suitable life cycle properties and their associated designs were evaluated and determined, with respect to the expected, individual life cycle paths.