Structuring and modelling norms for the recyclability assessment of products during their design

Abstract

Environmental issues, such as product recyclability, are becoming a crucial social concern for manufacturers. Often formulated in natural language, the norms and standards that govern these issues can be difficult to link to the product definition. It becomes necessary to provide the designer with appropriate support tools allowing, for instance, for the compliance of products with environmental criteria to be checked. In the current paper, we show how normative knowledge, coming from textual sources (eco-labels), can be expressed through constraints, allowing checking in a semi-automated process the recyclability of a product.

Keywords:

• Decision support system
• Knowledge-based system
• Conceptual modelling
• Constraints
• Norm
• Eco-label

Acknowledgements

This article is an extended version of a communication previously presented in the IFAC INCOM’06 conference (Houé and Grabot 2006) ISBN- 978-0-08-044654-7.