Life-cycle engineering: issues, tools and research

Life-cycle engineering (LCE) is a decision-making methodology that considers performance, environmental and cost requirements for the duration of a product. This methodology is becoming a norm for global companies that want to remain competitive. To facilitate and enhance the application of LCE methodology to industrial products, a number of computer tools or utilities that require minimal user input, and hence run automatically in the background of the design process, have been developed. These utilities are intended to provide a feedback on an evolving design without impeding or hampering the design process. There exists a need to continue research on the development of tools that simulate flows in a life-cycle and optimize them. These tools should be based on the client-server model base on the Internet to facilitate the e-Transition.