Life Cycle Engineering Based on Visual Analytics

Life cycle engineering (LCE) builds up on the comprehension of domain-specific engineering activities and their interlinkage along the product life cycle. Its goal is to guide engineering processes through knowledge regarding hotspots and trade-offs in terms of environmental, social and economic impacts. However, LCE implementations show shortcomings due to a discontinuous integration in key business processes as well as separated tool environments between core engineering disciplines and LCE methods and tools. Addressing the shortcomings, an interdisciplinary LCE framework is elaborated on the basis of a visual analytics (VA) process. This domain connects human interaction, data analysis and visualization. The framework is applied to the LCE case of shop-floor life cycle assessment. The realization of seamless toolchains from domain-specific tools is in the focus. Further challenges include the prioritization and bridging of relevant interfaces as well as their qualification for automation and near real-time processing.