Detection of Cause-Effect Relationships in Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment Based on an Engineering Graph

Abstract

Although Life Cycle Sustainability Assessments (LCSA) are important in evaluating the sustainability of complex products and services, there is no sufficient support for engineers performing LCSA. The concept of an Engineering Graph focuses on the relations of data within engineering. It provides a model that leverages existing data in engineering and extendibility to include specialized databases and open and public data from the semantic web. This paper proposes a concept of how Engineering Graphs can be used to address the issues of LCSA and support engineers.