Proposal for Intelligent Model Product Definition to Meeting the RoHS Directive

With increasing environmental awareness in society, manufacturing companies began to realize that they could benefit from the integration of environmental considerations into their products and processes. Although the electrical and electronics industries have developed uniquely fast in the world market, their products have typically been a major cause of the continuing deterioration of the environment and depletion of natural resources. Regulatory directives such as Restriction of Certain Hazardous Substances (RoHS) have been created for preventing the misuse of hazardous materials in product specifications, so companies have been compelled to assess relevant information on material use at the right moment and depth at certain stages of a product's lifecycle. The present paper proposes the application of semantic models for helping companies meet the requirements established by the RoHS Directive. A model, created in the form of ontology, establishes semantic relationships between stages of the product lifecycle, product structure and business objects. Business processes modeled in the form of activity and information flows are linked to RoHS requirements, which can be viewed through the generation of reports in the Essentials Project open source framework. The resulting semantic model is therefore useful for converting environment-related needs to design requirements through a product development process that addresses the RoHS directive. A consumer electronics product has been selected for demonstrating the feasibility of the proposed solution.