Colloquia

Summary

The increasing importance of environmental sustainability has driven organizations to adopt ecodesign practices to minimize the environmental impact of their products. However, integrating ecodesign into existing engineering processes remains a challenge, particularly in complex systems engineering contexts. This thesis addresses this challenge by proposing a novel ecodesign approach that leverages Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) to support environmental analysis and decision-making during the early phases of system development for Thales Netherlands. The approach builds on the ARCADIA methodology and the Capella tool, central to Thales’ MBSE environment, enabling the identification and analysis of environmental hotspots at the system architecture level. The approach focuses on calculating carbon footprints of individual components and linking these to system functionalities, offering a clear perspective on key design trade-offs. An application study involving a Thales radar system was conducted to validate the approach, demonstrating its potential to identify and address environmental impact during the early stages of system development. Key results from the study indicate that the proposed approach effectively integrates environmental considerations into Thales’s development process by levering MBSE to integrate and assess how non-functional aspects of system design can be addressed during the early development phases. This enables Thales to optimize the architecture early in its development based on customer and business needs beyond functional performance. The thesis concludes with practical recommendations for further embedding ecodesign into Thales’s engineering processes. This work contributes to advancing MBSE capabilities for sustainability goals and provides a foundation for future research and development in this area.