The growing demand for more environmentally sustainable products imposes new constraints and choices on system architects during the design phase. Traditionally, environmental performance trade-off analyses, such as Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), are carried out systematically outside of the Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) workflow and nearly exclusively by LCA specialists, with no direct connection to system design decisions. As a result, actionable levers that could significantly influence a product’s environmental impact are typically identified too late for meaningful design intervention.
This presentation addresses this gap by making environmental trade-off analysis natively accessible to architects within their established modeling environment. We introduce the integration of environmental criteria and trade-off functionalities directly into Capella, a leading MBSE tool, via the Ecodesign for Capella add-on, a solution developed and provided by the software editor Obeo.
As early adopters, we share a practical use case and experience report on the innovative potential and unique market positioning of Ecodesign for Capella.
The approach has been validated through a realistic use case: a fictitious drone inspection product line, adapted from literature and the publicly available AIDA model from IRT Saint Exupéry. The add-on enabled seamless data integration, streamlined traceability of environmental attributes, and empowered architects to perform design-impactful trade-offs without leaving their MBSE environment.
