Function-to-form mapping in design synthesis taking sustainable manufacturing issues into consideration

The function-to-form (F-T-F) mapping methodology provides a generic reasoning mechanism used in early design synthesis process to help designer map functional requirements of a product to a physical form (product) by optimally composing a set of pre-defined artifacts to satisfy the given physical constraints and design goals. The objective of this paper is to develop an integrated function-to-form technique that incorporates environmental constraints and other sustainable manufacturing issues into a previous function-toform mapping framework. Since sustainability is considered as a global constraint for any product, a top-down design strategy and an assembly-centric product representation are needed for the product's global evaluation and optimization. In this paper, it is proposed to integrate the Design for Manufacturing and Assembly (DFMA) and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) techniques into the function-to-form mapping framework for considering the assemblability, manufacturability and other issues related to the product's environmental impacts in its early design stage. A case study has been presented as a proofof- concept of the proposed methodology.