Enabling a data-driven sustainable product development in a circular economy.

Resource scarcity and environmental degradation are one of the most pressing issues faced by humanity. In the last decades, digitalization has created new opportunities of information exchange. This has enabled the growth of data-driven production systems, which offer synergetic opportunities towards developing sustainable and circular product designs. Similarly, for the industrial manufacturing sector, digital technologies provide significant opportunities to improve resource efficiency, manufacturing output, reduce costs and assist the development towards a sustainable circular economy. Regardless of the urgency of its implementation, the adoption of sustainable product management practices across companies is still low. Recent studies indicate a lack of criteria for selecting the most suitable tools and the high data intensity of many methods as important reasons that explain this. Considering the large amount of potentially useful data produced by product lifecycle management tools, this research aims at providing an overview on how to bridge the gap between existing data sources in manufacturing companies and the data needed to inform sustainable product development within the circular economy paradigm. More concretely, this research will come out with a classification of product lifecycle data sources that have been coupled in practice in corporate sustainability data exchange processes. Understanding the degree of compatibility between existing sustainability data in product lifecycle management systems and the existing tools to support decision-making in sustainable product development will enable bridging the existing data gaps and an easier identification of suitable tools by companies. Throughout this research, a review of methods to approach sustainable product development will be conducted, considering the type of data they demand. The outputs are a classification of data streams demanded by main eco-design tools and an overview of product lifecycle data available in most PLM systems.