Sustainable Development is the main paradigm for the future improvement of humankind in the 21st century. One of the guiding principles for engineering design is to develop products that conform to the sustainability paradigm. Whether a new product is to be designed or an existing one is to be improved, the process of creating distinctly more sustainable products needs to be monitored and managed. In order to address a global engineering design process, appropriate methods and tools are required. This proposal considers Product Lifecycle Management as one powerful key concept for the establishment of sustainable engineering design processes.

To manage an engineering design process and to handle the product complexity, the engineer has to administrate all kinds of data and information about the product. This would not be possible without using modern IT tools. The ability of using IT tools to support the integration and federation of distributed product data and their related processes as well as the administration of a high number of product variants have already been recognized as driving factors for success, survival and competitiveness. One benefit of computer aided engineering design is that it facilitates the development of sustainable products by a better availability of relevant information. Therefore, the product structure has to be extended with lifecycle processes.

In the presentation, one example of an eco-efficiency analysis as part of a sustainable monitoring will be introduced that is based on the Product Lifecycle Management concept. The introduced concept extends the product model as well as the process model by a technical-economical attention to ecological parameters. It allows an aggregated evaluation of energy and resource efficiency of the product over the product life cycle. A well-to-wheel view helps to identify environmental key factor and cost driver within the use phase, where CO2 emissions, resulting from fuel consumption, are still very high. Energetically improved technical products will assert themselves in enterprise practice only if they are advantageous in economic regard. The concept deals with both and is outlined in a way that it corresponds to a multidimensional, interdisciplinary and federated Product Lifecycle Management.