Requirements for the development of a decision-support solution for sustainability target cascading

Corporations view sustainable manufacturing as a mandate for competitiveness to put them at an advantage with consumers all over the world. This paper focuses on the need for a decision support solution that transforms the current time-consuming and reactive (post-design) sustainability assessment into a proactive approach available in the early phases of product design. Such a solution should focus primarily on the key area of target cascading, evaluation, and management, which does not exist for sustainability metrics, such as carbon footprint. It is important that the handling of sustainability be compatible with handling of these traditional attributes. The emphasis on traditional attributes, such as weight, is necessary, because it is one of the most important and cost-effective ways to improve fuel efficiency and reduce greenhouse gases. In this paper, we discuss several challenges in addressing this problem and propose the major components of an approach to enable target cascading of sustainability attributes. We describe the the multiple requirements on the development of the approach and raise important research questions that need to be addressed.