Material information model across product lifecycle for sustainability assessment

Material Information Model (MIM) is central to evaluating the impact of material properties on sustainability in the product life cycle. It is almost imperative that we need standardized distributed material information models to address the needs from different perspectives in the product life cycle (manufacturing, quality and testing perspectives etc.). This paper is an attempt to understand the complexity of material information model, the requirements for defining a high level material information model and explore the possibility of formalizing "a language" for defining material information model that can capture this information across different life cycle stages. It is possible that MIM may be both structured and unstructured (heterogeneous as well as unstructured which is common in web data). Therefore, it is necessary to go beyond the existing relational database formalisms to build real-time MIM information models. This paper develops conceptual ideas to address the above with recommendations for a distributed cloud-based architecture.