System Engineering and Design for Environment and Safety (DfES)

Increased emphasis on environmentally friendly practices, within the DoD and commercial sectors necessitates the need for Design for Environment and Safety (DfES) considerations in the System Engineering (SE) process. During the Requirements Development (RD) process the timely and accurate flow down of Environment and Safety (DfES) requirements ensures meeting company specific environmental goals, as well as imposed government regulations. Life cycle analysis (LCA), environmental impact analysis (EIA), and risk assessment methods provide ways of performing trade-off studies for system material and process selection. Trade-off studies to assess life cycle environmental and safety impact of the proposed designs are performed during the requirements analysis. Taking into consideration environmental and safety impacts along with other Materials and Processing (M&P) requirements in early trade studies enable a comprehensive decision-making process while facilitating the system design optimization within cost and schedule. While the main focus of this paper is to address typical trade studies and LCA in support of the DfES within the SE framework, a broader parallel effort took place to align the M&P process with the SE process.