Autodesk Fusion 360 Powered by SimaPro: Sustainability at the Beginning

CASPAR HONEE: Hello. Welcome, everybody. Welcome to the session Autodesk Fusion 360 Powered by SimaPro, Sustainability at the Beginning. Today's class, we have an agenda. We have three sections of the class.

The first is the why about sustainable design and sustainability trends. Second is the how. How do you actually address sustainability in designs? And lastly, we will present the what's where we have a solution that integrates with the Autodesk.

So let me start with the safe harbor statement, though. Here it is. Thank you for noticing that.

So my name is Caspar Honee. I work at PRe. We make software for environmental footprints. I get a lot of energy working with companies to achieve their sustainability agenda with our digital solutions. And with me today is Rajesh. Rajesh?

RAJESH BHARTIYA: Thanks, Caspar. Hi, everyone. I'm Rajesh Bhartiya, founder and CEO of ProtoTech. I'm a mechanical aerospace and computer science engineer and extremely passionate about developing 3D applications. I founded ProtoTech in 2005. And since then, we have contributed to design and development of over 200 applications spanning various domains. Over to you, Caspar.

CASPAR HONEE: Thank you, Rajesh. I'm really excited to do this together. So let's have a look in the first section of the class, which is the why. Why do we do sustainable design? Well, if we see this slide where we see two pictures, the small boat represents how much cost goes to research and developing product design.

Typically, that's about 5%. But if you think about it, the actual environmental cost is much larger, and we see that at the moment of the product design, it says already 80% of the environmental impact is decided right at that early stage. So that's why it's really important to think about aspects beyond the functional design and really think about, what does it mean for the environment, my product design?

So this kind of nicely sums it up. What is the impact of a product? And we all understand that if you want to move to a sustainable economy, we need products that are actually designed differently, made differently, used in a different way-- also, after use, are disregarded in an appropriate way.

And for that notion coming into play, that also means that the way designers think about their product design is changed, and teams need to be set up differently. It requires a different mindset to eco-design.

However, once it is working, there is a great benefit. And what we see when greener products come to market is that not only are the products greener, but the entire product system is actually designed for more environmental and better environmental performance.

Why do we need greener products? Well, about 35 years ago, there was a report, Our Common Future by the Norwegian Prime Minister Mrs. Brundtland, and it was made clear to the world that the way we produce and the way we consume products is not sustainable for the long run.

And it also, at that time, was made clear that the divide between rich and poor was not sustainable. So when they defined the definition for sustainability, it was-- and you probably already know this definition.

But it's about, how do you actually make sure that future generations will be able to fulfill their own needs while we, at the same time in our generation, can fulfill our needs? If we look 3 and 1/2 decades further, we see that we're not actually there yet.

We see quite an overshoot in what we call planetary boundaries, so the capacity or carrying capacity of our planet is jeopardized in a number of areas. For example, nitrogen phosphorus reserves and the way we use them is are in quite danger zones.

We also see climate change. Everybody looks at climate change [INAUDIBLE]. We are still at this zone where we can actually do something about it, hence the need to actually do that when we start with product development. Apply that sustainability to sustainable design.

[INAUDIBLE] So what is it, and where does it fit? How can sustainable design be achieved? First of all, it's about looking at the longer term and then looking at the negative impacts across the product system.

It can be achieved with new materials or less materials, better materials, but also we need to consider how effective the product is during its use phase or maybe repairability or end of life after use with regards to the reusability or recyclability. So it'll be in a close look at the economy and not have to rely on raw virgin materials from nature.

And then if we disregard the products, then we try not to dispose of them in nature in a harmful way. So this is what sustainable design is all about. Let's have a look what drives this.

So we see a number of trends in the current economy with companies that want to actually demonstrate that they can differentiate themselves on the green aspects of products, and that's fuels new demand and higher value. They can ask for a better price for services that are green.

Consumers have a-- well, they're conscious nowadays. They're well informed, and often make decisions, whether it be for green products over harmful ones.

Retailers translate their demands, and actually go upstream in the supply chain to ask their suppliers about performance indicators for the environment and how their products perform in balance with the targets they set.

Also, investors realize that in the long run, companies-- enterprises that have sustainable products and services and continue to improve have the higher value content and hence less risk and also see that they're more profitable over time. So better financial performance attracts, of course, investment.

And lastly, the latest legislation is increasing to secure and stimulate sustainable development. Take, for example, eco-design directive. It's [INAUDIBLE] implemented as we speak.

So in the end, this means that footprint information for products and services will be as common as a regular price tag on products, and people make decisions based on those aspects in addition to the regular cost.

But how do you reach eco-design, and how do you reach these goals for greener products and services and products that also address the more social dimension, not just economic damage?

Well, it's clear that you cannot do that alone. First of all, you, of course, need to look at, how can I design a better product? But having the information at hand to do that is difficult. The data is not there yet. And how do you how do you get to the data?

So in order to do that, we believe it's important to collaborate within the supply chain and have a dialogue with your peers and with your suppliers and clients to understand how products can be improved and suggest collaboration and an open attitude. Better sustainability can be achieved-- provided, of course, it's translated into action with knowledge.

So now that we understand what design is and why and what's happening in terms of the trends on the market, we can start to understand how to do this. And often when we're making decisions, it's important that there is actual data-driven decisions.

So how can you get sustainability metrics, the actual quantified numbers about what is sustainable and what is not? What is a green product, and what is not? And for this, we can apply a technique of lifecycle assessment.

I will quickly explain what the lifecycle assessment is all about. Lifecycle assessment is a methodology used to underline-- I should say, to underline footprint. So if you see products and services with a carbon footprint associated with, it is often derived using lifecycle assessment. It should be [INAUDIBLE].

Life cycle assessment is about taking the entire lifecycle of a product [INAUDIBLE] into account. So all the way from raw material extraction to the use phase and finally the disposal of the product-- taking into account all the steps that are there in that entire circle, such as the manufacturing the transport, the repairs, et cetera, et cetera.

As you can imagine, that is quite a lot of data that has to be gathered and computed. And for that, we luckily make software, and that's what PRe does-- where I work [INAUDIBLE] makes SimaPro software to calculate things, taking a life cycle approach.

So once you have the data that describes how the product system operates across all these stages-- production, use, end of life-- and you have all the emissions and waste [INAUDIBLE] energy and material streams identified that are associated with those activities, then you can start to calculate the environmental impact.

Now, out of that calculation comes an enormous amount of data. It's useful to group it into categories, otherwise it becomes too large. So we see here in the seconds after we've done the description of the product system, we see we have a number of environmental impact categories and social impact categories where we can group the results into.

This list is not comprehensive. There is a lot more, but it gives you an idea of the variety of all the different impact categories. In life cycle assessment, taking a holistic approach is important to avoid the problem shift.

So let's look into that. If we optimize our design for climate change-- for example, for carbon footprint minimization-- that does not necessarily mean it's also optimized for other categories, such as maybe eco-toxicity. So we also need to incorporate those kind of metrics and indicators for us to make sure that we're not moving from one place to another.

So having these categories helps us with that, as they give an oversight on where the impact is and how much. From there, we can derive, what are the important metrics for us to make decisions with as a company or organization or designer?

So maybe we don't want to focus on all the areas because they're not necessary in the hotspots or [INAUDIBLE]. Important areas of impact are to us in a number such as CO2, human rights, and actual cost or value profit.

So we can group them again and aggregate from there. With this data that's coming out of our calculations, we can do something with it. We can use it for reporting. We can identify hotspots in the supply chain, public design. We can use it for benchmarking against other products and services or other companies, alternative designs for product development.

Lastly, there are other uses, such as, how do we also attribute performance improvements across an organization or to individual roles in [INAUDIBLE]? And life cycle assessment allows you to make these-- to do this in a quantified way, so to make these metrics available as the numbers.

OK. So LCA, life cycle assessment. If you group the uses of it, it can be used for reporting, performance, monitoring, and operations management, as well as for product design and interface. And obviously, the value is more if you go up.

So compliance is the minimum to show how well you're doing, maybe in marketing. But if you can actually use this data to make decisions that bring you to a higher level of performance through a product innovation, for example, the value is quite a lot more.

So this way of thinking, taking the holistic design and implementing it into-- which is very common to, of course, design thinking-- but also taking these aspects in on the sustainability side can unlock solutions that not only help our planet, but also result in innovations.

[INAUDIBLE]. So now we enter our third section of the class today. Knowing what the life cycle assessment is, how you can use it in design for eco-design purposes. But how do you then do that. If you know that the work associated with making such an LCA is quite a lot of work to get it?

And it's timing-- it takes a lot of time to do, whereas the skills are also limited on the market. So there's thousands of people in the world that can make life cycle assessments. But if you compare that to the billions of products we have in the marketplace, it's hard to do that.

So this is where we think digitalization can help. We can scale up the use of life cycle assessment information by applying IT.

So where we come originally from-- let's say, the '90s where LCA started from a static project-oriented, time intensive, small scale approach, we are now entering an area of era where we can utilize digital means to make it more dynamic and flexible and interactive as well as much faster and larger scale.

So we can make the data that is actually required when you want to take decisions available there and then [INAUDIBLE]. For that, we need components like system integration.

So if you want to work within software and you want to know the type of data, you can connect to other software, such as SimaPro, that allows you to bring in those calculated results from the life cycle assessment calculations.

And SimaPro is now equipped with an API to connect to, so that's [INAUDIBLE]. And we've applied that in the next solution that we want to share with you, and this is what we'll show in a minute.

So Autodesk empowered us to work together with ProtoTech and come up with an application that helps with designers-- gets the footprint information right there when they need it during the design process within the context of their application. So that is really quite thankful for that.

And we've learned in that process, having the joy of working with ProtoTech, that to get to these type of sustainability solutions, we need to have an open mind and be collaborative. And that way, not doing it alone, but together, we achieved a lot of synergy.

[INAUDIBLE] So I want to explain the journey that we went on together where we had the goal-- the common goal-- to develop a web app for designers to assess sustainability during the design . And ProtoTech's role was design development. Rajesh, can you tell us more about the journey?

RAJESH BHARTIYA: Thanks, Caspar. Initially, when we were called upon by Autodesk to realize this idea, we had quite a few challenges ahead of us. While we knew what environmental impact meant from a layman's perspective, we had no clue about the technicalities, the details, [INAUDIBLE] Caspar said involving in the computation of life cycle assessment.

But further, there were quite a few technological components involved in building this app. Some APIs that we planned to use were available only in a closed beta program. Our dev team had to ensure that we were up to speed on each of these technologies.

We also had to keep dockerization in mind for ease of deployment. The whole effort, as Caspar said, again, involved global collaboration with various teams spread across different time zones, Caspar has the SimaPro team from the Netherlands, [? Zoe ?] from Autodesk Sustainability Group in the West Coast, API dev teams from Autodesk in various US time zones, the UI/UX team from the UK, and [INAUDIBLE] from India.

As, again, Caspar mentioned, that we need to think sustainability, and it cannot be an afterthought. We had to ensure that we make the environmental impact calculation readily available to everyone, starting with folks involved in the product ideation to the engineers working on the manufacturing aspects.

And from a very high level, the application is simply fetching the data from Fusion, feeding it SimaPro for environmental impact calculations, getting the results back, and displaying it to the user-- a kind of a bridge, I would say, between Fusion user and SimaPro's sustainability computation engine.

So this is about technology stack. We utilized eight different technology components to build this up. On the front end for the application itself and the user interface, we use the HIG Library from Autodesk, which is based on the React JS. It's available in public domain and on the [INAUDIBLE].

HIG not only helped us avoid reinventing the wheel, but also made our application look and feel aligned to the ecosystem [INAUDIBLE] Autodesk Fusion. To access the user's hub and the data there, we used a three-legged Autodesk [INAUDIBLE] API.

The model files were accessed from the user hub using Fusion data APIs and rendered in a component derived from [INAUDIBLE]. We used a Python Flask for the back end development and established a communication between SimaPro in Fusion Data.

And to enable LCA computations, the mass of the material properties were fetched using Model Derivative APIs. The actual LC computations were triggered invoking SimaPro APIs. And finally, Dockers were used for the deployment.

So in the next three slides, I will drill down further into the implementation. It will get a bit technical. Please brace for it. As I mentioned for the UI, we are using Autodesk HIG Library, which is based on React JS. HIG components are currently used, and we plan to use more. But currently, we are using model, preview, tabs, spacer, typography, and button.

And our first step is to get the user authentication using three legged [? auth ?] from the Autodesk user to access the CAD models residing on the [INAUDIBLE], and that we do via Fusion Data API. And after successful authentication, we load the list of CAD files stored on that hub and users account in a preview on the left panel.

And of course, we will show you the demo also. The user now selects a model from the preview of the project tab to work on his or her design. We fetch the identifier for the selected model using, again, Fusion Data API. To display the 3D rendering of the model, we use both data management API and access the visual representation of that model.

This [INAUDIBLE] is spread to the full viewer, which displays the 3D view of the model. And [INAUDIBLE] very high quality 3D rendering as well as standard operations like Zoom, [INAUDIBLE] within the browser environment. Also, in this view, users can select components and preview specific properties and many more things.

Once the user is ready to perform the LCA, she or he creates the calculating back button. And on this action, a POST request is triggered on the backend service for some additional processing before it's relayed to the server.

Now, continuing the implementation. In the back end as a part of assessment, BOM properties such as mass and material are required. We use the Forge Model Derivative APIs to fetch the IDs of the CAD model and the BOM data. We also fetch the object tree of the CAD model, the hierarchy.

And now, we have the object hierarchy and the BOM properties for the model. We merge this information to create a hierarchical object tree with BOM properties attached to each node and pack this information into a custom JSON format. [INAUDIBLE] we could have processed all this on the client itself.

But for security reasons, the SimaPro APIs cannot be invoked directly from the front end. So we developed a middleware system, which could act as a communication conduit between the app and the SimaPro server. So contrary to our initial perception, this made the implementation simpler and helped us segregate the BOM processing from the UI code.

And one more thing. We have to provide authentication to access SimaPro services. And for this preview release, we simply bake the license key into our code. To initiate the LCA [INAUDIBLE], we first need to create a project on SimaPro's portal and link material libraries. And this was done, again, via /product/libraries SimaPro APIs

We now begin configuring SimaPro services. For each object in the BOM data, we need to create a corresponding process in the SimaPro database. Initially, the API had to be called in a loop for each object. But we quickly realized that this wasn't efficient as it ended up in too many network calls and back and forth.

Thankfully, SimaPro provided us with another API to send all the objects at once in a [INAUDIBLE]. For quantity, we have not considered instancing, the assembly instancing at this stage, and we are setting 1P, that is, one piece, as a reference amount at each process.

Next, we connect the process nodes with other process nodes or the material library node using a connector called flow. Flow connector also indicates or has a quantity attached to it. As a part of one time setup, all the Fusion materials are imported into SimaPro database, and each material is provided a unique ID.

This mapping table is then exported as a JSON file and made available to our app, which then we use as a reference table to sort of translate the Fusion material into SimaPro material. And as we attach [INAUDIBLE], we find out the SimaPro raw material ID from this JSON file, and then attach to the corresponding method to process that [INAUDIBLE].

Oh. Sorry, back. So on the right side, this is how SimaPro project will look after our example [INAUDIBLE] the utility knife, after we have mapped everything. And finally, now we are all set to perform our LCA.

To trigger the LCA and compute the results, we call the calculation along with the project ID-- the SimaPro API. This API provides us the calculation ID, which we store in a local SQLite database. We use this calculation ID in two ways.

Since this is a [INAUDIBLE] process we call calculation slash date, providing the calculation ID API, to check the status of the process. We get either in process-- that is, calculations are still being performed. Or we get failed if there is or there was some error during the computations.

Or we get successive if the process is done and the results are available. For every success return, we again call the calculation API to get the output or the calculated value and see results.

And once we have mixed all the right ingredients to make our magic potion, it's time to say abracadabra. Over to you, Caspar, for the demo.

PRESENTER: Get started with the Autodesk web app solution, powered by SimaPro. You can view and select your projects from the left hand menu and navigate around your drawings as you would in Autodesk Fusion 360 and calculate your environmental impact. Let's select utility knife, for example.

As mentioned, you have similar functionalities of Fusion 360 on the bottom area of your design. Now, let's calculate your impact. All the necessary information of your design is sent to SimaPro back stage. A calculation is run and returned here. Now, let's view the report.

You get the total impact of your design product on three impact categories-- global warming, water use, and land use. A small explanation for each impact category is also provided under these.

Our results breakdown per component or part of your design is also available so you can identify which one contributes more to that specific category.

When you make changes to your design and you want to know the impact, you can simply sync those changes, calculate the report again, and see then your results on the same three impact categories.

Our report history is available too. You can track the impact of your design based on the changes made for the same three impact categories and compare.

You can use the tabs on the top of the screen to navigate the web app. Once you're done, you just simply need to sign out.

CASPAR HONEE: Thank you very much, [INAUDIBLE]. That was my colleague, [INAUDIBLE], who really clearly explained how the web app works. And what we see is that designers are provided with instant indicators on the eco-design performance of their designs straight from the Autodesk model.

And this can help and guide on screen product development, we believe, and we're interested to learn more. And the feature where the history is provided does give a nice ability-- it provides an at-a-glance scenario comparison to see the differences and the advancement [INAUDIBLE].

So with that, I would like to thank you and conclude this class. Thank you, Rajesh. Thank you, [INAUDIBLE]. And thank you as an audience for showing up.

If you want to learn more, follow us online. Thank you, Autodesk, for facilitating this class. Have a nice day.