Development and implementation of a Product Life Cycle Optimization model

Nowadays, the worldwide economic downturn lead the manufacturer and their suppliers to cut costs and enhance the performances. In addition, environmental protection is becoming more and more important and green manufacturing got an expected practice. Based on those recognitions, in the early stage of product design environmental impacts must be weighted, balanced and optimized against other concerns, such as Life Cycle Costs (LCC), availability, time to market, etc. These multiples and often conflicting objectives pose a challenging and complex optimization problem. Thus, the focus is moved from the single methodology towards the integration and optimization of all of them together. With this aim a new term, Product Life Cycle Optimization (PLCO), has been coined in order to identify those kind of problem. The aim of the paper is to propose a PLCO multi-objective model that optimizes simultaneously, along the product life cycle, costs, environmental impacts and performance values. The model is developed with two open-source Java based frameworks.