Exploring design trade-offs among sustainability, performance, and manufacturability when considering integration of new technologies

Paper in proceeding, 2025

To meet the upcoming sustainability challenges, aerospace manufacturers need to develop products that both address complex sustainability factors and ensure profitable realization. Furthermore, the sustainability perspective needs to be lifted from focusing on carbon emissions, and broadened to include a system-level socio-ecological view. Manufacturers are thus challenged to balance sustainability, manufacturability, and performance, but lack the methods and tools to make well-informed decisions. We propose a method for conducting multi-domain trade-off studies in the early design phase. A functional architecture modelling approach is utilized to model performance and manufacturing aspects. Together with a relative sustainability fingerprint conducted on design alternatives, design spaces can be explored with respect to performance, manufacturability, and sustainability.