The environmental impacts of a product are predominantly determined in the early stages of its creation. To effectively embed circularity in line with the Circular Economy (CE), circularity strategies need to be holistically integrated into business models and supported by multi-criteria decision making. Such a decision requires comprehensive data from entire product lifecycles, building upon internal production data and information anticipating the value chain. End-to-end application of Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) offers significant potential to systematically capture this information and establish sustainability as a key success factor in product engineering.
In this study, existing approaches to the implementation of sustainability in PLM are analyzed through a systematic literature review. Following the PRISMA methodology, relevant reviews and approaches at the intersection of sustainability and PLM are identified. The search is conducted using portals such as Scopus and Web of Science. The scope is expanded by incorporating articles from the MDPI Sustainability series and the top 200 results from Google Scholar. Using search vectors comprising keywords relating to sustainability and PLM, 892 publications are identified. These are narrowed down to around 90 approaches based on inclusion criteria such as engineering relevance and product-level sustainability evaluation. These approaches are then analyzed in a bibliometric review, focusing on the core topics used. The current state of PLM is examined through a categorization into methods, tools and models. This categorization refers to fundamentals in engineering methodologies. Based on this categorization, a mapping is conducted with capabilities provided by PLM. Basic categories are derived both from the literature and from analyzing commercial PLM offerings. Thus, the mapping covers capabilities relating to origination, management and technical characterizations and reference elements relating to products, projects, processes, documents and collaboration.
These analysis results are used to develop a conceptual multi-layered model to structure and improve the support of sustainability-oriented engineering by PLM. The model covers the following layers from data to decision making: data sources in processes of product life, integrated metadata models, sustainability metrics, algorithms, reference software implementation and decision-points in product engineering. This holistic model is validated through three industrial product examples and available PLM solutions. The validation covers cases from different company-size, industrial branches and positions in value creation chains. Results are discussed regarding the literature, considering concepts of data spaces like Catena-X and Manufacturing-X.
The findings provide a holistic perspective on the current state of sustainability in PLM. The proposed model serves as a framework to enable the systematic implementation of sustainable PLM strategies.
Author Contributions
Conceptualization, I.G., J.P. and S.R.; methodology, J.P.; validation, S.R. and J.P.; writing—original draft preparation, S.R. and J.P.; writing—review and editing, I.G., J.P. and S.R.; visualization, S.R. and J.P.; supervision, I.G. and J.P.; project administration, I.G.; funding acquisition, I.G. and J.P. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.
Funding
The research was funded by the Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWE) within the project Decide4ECO Model-based, predictive and flexible decision support in the development of ecological, circular value creation through data ecosystems (13MX002G).
Institutional Review Board Statement
Not applicable.
Informed Consent Statement
Not applicable.
Data Availability Statement
No new data were created or analyzed in this study. Data sharing is not applicable to this article.
Conflicts of Interest
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
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