A major challenge for any manufacturer is including aspects of sustainable development in product design. These are related to the social, environmental and economic impacts of the proposed product. This paper proposes the development of an eco-case based reasoning (Eco-CBR) method for supporting sustainable product design. This approach is intended to be used to help industrial decision-makers to propose solutions to new product design feature requirements by reusing solutions from similar cases and their past experience. Information related to the solutions contains details of product dimensions, life cycle assessment (LCA) concerning their impact on carbon footprint, water eutrophication, air acidification and the total energy consumed by the product and related processes throughout its entire life cycle. These solutions also contain estimations of the manufacturing, environmental, end-of-life (EOL) and economic costs. The method is demonstrated using a case study that considers the design of the set of medical forceps, based upon identifying and utilising information related to the similarities within the existing cases in the CBR library. The paper demonstrates how this method can help the designer to shorten the process of design and contribute information that can itself maintain and add to the knowledge contained within the case bases stored in the library.

Keywords. Eco-CBR, LCA, costing, product design.