Integrate Sustainability Assessment into Autodesk Fusion 360

Makersite is an award-winning data software company that develops next-generation product data management tools for the global manufacturing industry. Makersite offers the only cloud-based platform combining data aggregation and live applications for agile product life cycle management. Makersite empowers companies to manage product sustainability, cost, and compliance.

Specific Challenges: 

• Fetch BOM from Autodesk Fusion 360 and bake in the schema to make it ready for assessment.
• Display environment calculation details and product recommendation details in one tree table for better insights.
• Integrate Forge viewer with heatmaps in Autodesk Fusion 360.

   
                              Image: Costing response

Frequently the sustainability of a product is calculated in later phases of product design, resulting in the redesign, and high costs in terms of money and time. 

Therefore, the project goal or the idea was to do an impact assessment of CO2 emission and cost of design (manufacturing and material) right at the time of design. And provide suggestions for alternative materials for use in manufacturing to reduce both costs and CO2 emissions.

                                 Image: Eco-design history

In order to achieve the project goal and to contribute to the idea, ProtoTech Solutions has supported Makersite in the below:

• Using Autodesk Fusion 360 APIs, fetched BOM for each component by traversing to each leaf node and baked in custom JSON format.
• As per the design, ProtoTech Solutions used the Autodesk HIG component library. But to have an advanced feature of the tree table, used a third-party library to display the impact assessment response with some customization. As the assessment response was separate for environment calculation and alternative, compared the names in both environment calculation details and product recommendation details and then showed the details inline.
• In order to load Autodesk Forge viewer and load specific models, required Autodesk authentication.
• Authenticated the user using Autodesk OAuth. This is a required step for visualizing the heatmap.
• Loaded the 3D model using Autodesk Forge Viewer. Then compared the component details from the Autodesk Forge tree hierarchy with the assessment response to display the appropriate CO2 heatmap.
  
  Technology stack: C++, React

The Business outcomes resulted from this project are :

• Gets insights into CO2 emission right at the earlier phase of the design
• Provide high-level cost estimation of component material and manufacturing
• Provide alternative suggestions to reduce CO2 emissions and cost

    Product recommendations Product recommendations Product recommendations

                               Img: Product recommendations

Testimonial

"The new Makersite add-on for Autodesk Fusion 360 is a game changer in enabling designers to make high-confidence decisions on CO2 and costs in real-time, by leveraging sustainability insights within Autodesk Fusion 360’s product design environment. Thanks to Prototech's expertise, we were able to implement this solution quickly and in a collaborative way with Makersite. The Makersite add-on for Fusion 360 is now available on the Autodesk App Store for users to download and apply to customers’ projects, so they can design cost-effective sustainable products at scale."
Zoé Bezpalko, Senior Sustainability Strategy Manager / Autodesk