Structuring and Modelling Norms for the Recyclability Assessment of Products During Their Design Raymond Houé Ngouna, Bernard Grabot
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Structuring and modelling norms for the recyclability assessment of products during their design Raymond Houé Ngouna, Bernard Grabot To cite this version: Raymond Houé Ngouna, Bernard Grabot. Structuring and modelling norms for the recyclability assessment of products during their design. International Journal of Computer Integrated Manufac- turing, Taylor & Francis, 2007, 20 (7), pp.699-714. 10.1080/09511920701567754. hal-02111647 HAL Id: hal-02111647 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02111647 Submitted on 26 Apr 2019 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Open Archive Toulouse Archive Ouverte (OATAO) OATAO is an open access repository that collects the work of Toulouse researchers and makes it freely available over the web where possible. This is an author-deposited version published in: http://oatao.univ-toulouse.fr/ Eprints ID: 17858 To link to this article: DOI:10.1080/09511920701567754 URL:http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09511920701567754 To cite this version: Houé Ngouna, Raymond and Grabot, Bernard Structuring and modelling norms for the recyclability assessment of products during their design. (2007) International Journal of Computer Integrated Manufacturing, 20 (7). 699-714. ISSN 0951-192X Any correspondence concerning this service should be sent to the repository administrator: [email protected] Structuring and modelling norms for the recyclability assessment of products during their design R. HOUE* and B. GRABOT LGP/ENIT, 47 Avenue d’Azereix – BP 1629 – 65016 Tarbes Cedex, France Environmental issues, such as product recyclability, are becoming a crucial social concern for manufacturers. Often formulated in natural language, the norms and standards that govern these issues can be difficult to link to the product definition. It becomes necessary to provide the designer with appropriate support tools allowing, for instance, for the compliance of products with environmental criteria to be checked. In the current paper, we show how normative knowledge, coming from textual sources (eco-labels), can be expressed through constraints, allowing checking in a semi-automated process the recyclability of a product. Keywords: Decision support system; Knowledge-based system; Conceptual modelling; Constraints; Norm; Eco-label make use of the knowledge extracted from an environ- 1. Introduction mental norm or standard, a final objective would be to Owing to the sustainable development paradigm, environ- make this knowledge available within the computer aided mental issues such as product recyclability, are becoming a design (CAD)–computer aided manufacturing (CAM) crucial social concern for manufacturers. Indeed, they will systems, already used during the design of the product. increasingly have to face regulations that will lead them to Therefore the main problem to solve is how to model the respect tight environmental constraints. In particular, these recyclability knowledge at hand in a way that could be constraints will cause them to consider the recyclability of consistent with the product model defined in the existing their products and the associated recycling processes. design tools. To this end, we suggest adding to the usual However, addressing the product recyclability after its design parameters of a product (already present in its bill design, often leads to some basic recovery and destruction of materials) those specifically concerned with the recycla- processes such as incineration, that are increasingly bility area. subjected to tight rules. It is interesting to take into Eco-labels have been chosen here as examples of account the product recyclability during the early phases of recyclability requirements, because they are dedicated to the lifecycle, particularly during the design phase, in order types of products and therefore do not only consider to improve its efficiency or make a concurrent advantage generic assumptions on eco-friendly design. A sample of out of it. well-known eco-labels, among the large panel accessible, An initial problem is that environmental norms or has been considered then analysed. These sources have standards are usually formulated in natural language in a allowed us to suggest an extended product model including textual form, and are therefore difficult to interpret by a the main data required for the recyclability assessment. human or software. It can therefore be difficult to link these NIAM/ORM (Halpin 1998), an ontology-based modelling requirements to the product definition. It is then necessary language, has been used to facilitate the interpretation of to provide means for translating these norms and standards the considered knowledge sources, and has allowed us to into an interpretable form. In order to help the designer to translate them into rules linking the parameters of the *Corresponding author. Email: [email protected] product. This approach is, for instance, close to the one system (DSS) intended to facilitate the verification of the suggested in Blaise et al. (2003) in the field of safe machines. compliance of a product with a given norm or standard. The rules built from the considered knowledge sources Within the framework of the PREMI project, the have then been expressed by constraints and propagated in objective of this study is to develop a prototype of DSS the product structure in order to analyse the compliance of with the following characteristics: the design of the product with the criteria contained in a given norm or standard. The CLAIRE object language has (a) online access on the designer’s workstation, with an been used to implement this knowledge-processing step. integration to CAD–CAM tools; The current paper is structured as follows: the context of (b) selection of a given standard or eco-label in a the design for recyclability is first presented. The main database; environmental regulations to which the manufacturers are (c) assessment of the ongoing product design accord- submitted will be highlighted. A brief state of the art related ing to the selected standard. to the support of the design activity in the context of the sustainable development will then be presented. The The proposed system must allow communication with proposed extended product model will then be described. existing design systems, since a part of the required infor- The use of an appropriate modelling formalism (NIAM/ mation is already contained in the CAD–CAM tools used ORM), allowing assisting in the interpretation of the by the designer, or in the product lifecycle management textual sources, will be illustrated, followed by the descrip- (PLM) system of the company. Therefore, it has been defi- tion of the translation of an eco-label into rules, then ned according to the methodology summarized in figure 1: constraints. Finally, the feasibility of the suggested metho- dology will be shown through the description of a software 1. The data on the product contained in the bill of prototype, used for the test of the compliance of a product materials, always produced during the design described in the literature on the Blue Angel eco-label. process, were considered as a base; 2. A set of selected norms and eco-labels was analysed for listing the data required by the recyclability 2. The context of design for recyclability analysis not present in usual bills of materials (step 1 on figure 1); 2.1. Context of the study 3. The consequence is the definition of an extended bill This study is part of a European project, PREMI of materials (step 2). The additions may be of (www.premi.cf.ac.uk) (Product Recyclability and Minia- different types: new objects (symbolized by a dark turization), aiming at transferring innovative technologies square in the bill of materials); data on the links to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the between products (describing for instance how the Atlantic area, and focusing on environmental issues. As sub-components are assembled), symbolized by the part of the topic of products recyclability, our aim is to dark circle, or new data related to components define a method allowing to extract recyclabilty knowledge already described in the bill of materials (dark line in from norms, and to make use of it in a decision support the light rectangle); Figure 1. Principle of the suggested system. 4. The standards or eco-labels have to be modelled by fr_register_15103030.html) in order to guarantee the low ‘criteria’, so that these criteria can be applied on the environmental impact of given families of product: e.g. data present in the extended bill of materials. directives on the waste management and clean technologies such as the Directive 2002/53/EC dealing with the end-of- The expected use of the system is then the following: life vehicles, the Directive 2002/95/EC related to the restriction of the use of certain hazardous substances in 1. When a standard or eco-label is selected in the Electrical and Electronic Equipments (EEE), the Directive database, the corresponding criteria are extracted 2002/96/EC concerning the Waste of EEE (WEEE). In (step 3); the EU countries where this last directive is active, the 2. The criteria are then instantiated and propagated in responsibility of the manufacturers is engaged on the the bill of materials (step 4). In some cases, questions management and on the cost of the recycling. to the designer can be required when the data With a more voluntary approach, with respect to the available are not sufficient for allowing to state legal context (see the bottom right, part A of figure 2), non- whether a criterion is verified; compulsory agreements have also been established, in- 3.