Holistic Approach for Secondary Weight Improvements

Abstract Today, traditional lightweight strategies, e.g. material substitution, structural adaption or change of manufacturing processes, cannot sufficiently meet the claims of a resource and energy conservation of products during production, usage and recycling lifecycle phases in a sufficient way anymore. These primary weight optimization measures represent methods for a direct and locally applied weight improvement and regard the selective optimization of individual components. Based on these primary methods of weight optimization the so-called secondary weight improvement methods can find the remedy. They allow starting with the primary measures which are applied on a specific part of a technical system an optimization of surrounding or coupled components or subsystems. In literature, some first approaches of handling and managing these secondary weight optimizations are existing. In this paper, these approaches are identified and get a further development. A special focus is on the determination of the impact of these secondary weight optimizations on a considered system.