Topic 1: Early-stage design of sustainable vehicle and transport solutions
Enhancing vehicle and transport solutions must align with environmental, economic, and social objectives. The early-stage design presents the best opportunity for enhancements due to its flexibility, yet it suffers from limited information, resulting in gradual changes rooted in past designs rather than transformative shifts. This topic focuses on integrating sustainability aspects, such as eco-design and circular design, into the design of vehicle and transport solutions. It also explores strategies for addressing paradoxical situations (e.g., the eco-paradox), and considering trade-offs in design decisions to create sustainable solutions meeting user needs.
Contributions shall focus on, but it are not limited to, the following research questions and topics
- How can sustainability of vehicle technologies and transport solutions be evaluated and how can the evaluation results be transferred into design and development processes?
- Which approaches can effectively support decision-making for product optimization to reach sustainability goals?
- How can agile development processes support sustainable product development?
- How can transportation systems be evaluated in a holistic way, considering user demands, infrastructure, and specific boundary conditions?
- Which approaches can support vehicle design for circular economy, covering resource efficiency as well as re-use and recyclability?
- How can system modelling and simulation support the handling of trade-offs in vehicle design?
- Which approaches are able to face the challenges of organizational responsibility and integration of sustainability targets in the course of sustainable vehicle development?
- How will upcoming sustainability-related legislation influence vehicle design and which measures are required to reach the targets?
Given the nature of these topics, a wide variety of studies are invited, ranging from the proposition of technical and methodological concepts and prototypes over single and multiple-case studies of the implementation of different digital technologies, to deductive empirical studies investigating antecedents and potential effects on all system levels.