PRé Sustainability gains real-time insights into environmental impacts using Autodesk Fusion 360

PRé Sustainability is a Netherlands-based company that provides consulting, training, and software solutions to improve sustainability performance. PRé’s flagship product is SimaPro, life cycle assessment (LCA) software that arms product designers and manufacturers, decision-makers, and sustainability experts with science-based data to make informed decisions about environmental impacts.

THE CHALLENGE:

1. The data produced by LCA and product design is complex and fragmented. 
2. SimaPro collects and analyses various sustainability performance information, from raw material selections to transportation emissions. 
3. That data lives in SimaPro while, product designers create models inside separate CAD and 3D modelling systems. They’re making critical decisions about weights, dimensions, and materials in the early design stages when 80% of environmental impacts are defined. Yet, they have little or disconnected visibility into sustainability data during those stages. 
4. Too often, the design is baked when it reaches a performance assessment.

ProtoTech’s Team built the PRé Sustainability application on Autodesk Platform Services for sustainability computations. They integrated SimaPro’s LCA service with Autodesk to make sustainability computations available to the designers in the Autodesk Fusion 360 environment.

PRé wanted to connect SimaPro’s calculation engine directly with the software where designers are modelling for faster insights into design choices.

Partnering with systems integrator ProtoTech Solutions, the companies built an Autodesk Fusion 360 web application that provides real-time LCA analysis alongside the design. The viewer pulls in the Autodesk Fusion 360 model, while the Model Derivative API fetches the bill of materials (BOM) data. The BOM posts to SimaPro’s cloud engine, which returns instant impact calculations. SimaPro’s analysis runs entirely in the background while engineers remain in the Autodesk Fusion 360 web app interface.

This merging of data helps designers test their assumptions and get immediate feedback on questions like What’s the environmental impact? Is a lighter-weight material plausible? Is steel necessary, or 

will something less carbon-intensive work? Bringing these questions upstream enables sustainability-led product design at scale.

Environmental data can’t be complex or delayed. They need to be made easy for people to have good information, right when they need it. Autodesk’s cloud-based APIs make this possible.

The SimaPro calculations run entirely in the background while someone is designing. The analysis can be brought right into the Autodesk Fusion 360 models. As design adjustments are made, one will receive immediate feedback about environmental impacts.

The solution provided in this case would be better decision-making and sustainability outcomes for product designs. Next would be a more efficient process for integrating performance data and reduced design churn in achieving sustainability metrics.