Towards Regulatory Compliance Through PLM

Increasingly stringent laws regulating the amounts of hazardous substances and recyclable content in products are placing a heavy burden on product manufacturers. While manufacturers strive to be the first to bring innovative products to the market, they need to safeguard against late design changes or penalties that might result from non-compliance. At the same time, they need to ensure that the quality of the product is maintained, and prevent undue pressure on suppliers, who have to meet targets specified by the manufacturer. This paper presents a method to utilize the enterprise-wide scope provided by modern PLM systems to account for these considerations in the early design stages during the selection of material and processing specifications for product components. The method employs the chance constrained programming technique to account for the inherent uncertainties faced during these early design stages.