The Learning Surrogate Life-Cycle Approach and Beyond

"The Learning Surrogate Life-Cycle Approach and Beyond: Inspiring Research on Green Engineering and Product Design for Sustainability"Presented by Dr. Inês SousaDepartment of Environmental Sciences and Engineering,
Universidade Nova de Lisboa (UNL),
Lisbon, PortugalABSTRACTThis seminar will focus on an innovative approach for performing preliminary life-cycle assessments (LCA) during early product design stages. The overhead in developing parametric LCA models for a diverse range of product concepts and the lack of detailed information during conceptual design stages make the integration of traditional LCA models into product design impractical. The learning surrogate LCA method uses artificial neural networks (ANN) and requires readily accessible product information to provide approximate, yet powerful, analytical LCA results, early in the conceptual design phase. ANN are trained to generalize on product attributes, which are characteristics of product concepts, and environmental data from pre-existing LCA studies. The product design team queries the trained artificial model with new high-level attributes to quickly obtain an approximate environmental assessment for a new product concept. The predicted environmental performance, along with other key performance measures, can be used in tradeoff analysis and concept selection, and thus be timely incorporated into product development cycles. New topics on green engineering and product design for sustainability will also be presented for inspiring future research.MONDAY, OCTOBER 23, 2006 -GERONTOLOGY BUILDING (GER) ROOM 309 -1:00 - 2:00 PM

Location: Ethel Percy Andrus Gerontology Center (GER) - 309

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Georgia Lum