FESTivE: an information system method to improve product designers and environmental experts information exchanges

Effective collaboration between product designers and environmental experts is an important driver for the ecodesign practice in industry. This paper investigates the principal functions required for such an effective collaboration and aims at facilitating them. Product designers should be able to integrate the environmental parameters into their activities, and to exchange information dynamically with the environmental expert whenever needed during the design process. Therefore, the IT system should be in itself dynamic and flexible to the integration of new concepts (knowledge, software). Recent developments in Model Driven Engineering (MDE) are showing some interesting results to gain flexibility and dynamism in the IT system. Combining software interoperability using model federation based on MDE with the specificity of ecodesign practice in industry this paper proposes the FESTivE method for Federate EcodeSign Tool modEls. Experimented in two different industrial contexts the practical feasibility of FESTivE has been validated with practitioners. Results on the effects of using FESTivE in industry shows that product designers and environmental experts are more equipped to anticipate and to respond to each other's needs at each stage of the design process of product or service. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.