Environmental Trade-offs into MBSE: An Application of Ecodesign for Capella for System Architects

The growing demand for more environmentally sustainable products imposes new constraints and choices on system architects during the design phase. Traditionally, environmental performance trade-off analyses, such as Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), are carried out systematically outside of the Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) workflow and nearly exclusively by LCA specialists, with no direct connection to system design decisions. As a result, actionable levers that could significantly influence a product’s environmental impact are typically identified too late for meaningful design intervention.

This presentation addresses this gap by making environmental trade-off analysis natively accessible to architects within their established modeling environment. We introduce the integration of environmental criteria and trade-off functionalities directly into Capella, a leading MBSE tool, via the Ecodesign for Capella add-on, a solution developed and provided by the software editor Obeo.

As early adopters, we share a practical use case and experience report on the innovative potential and unique market positioning of Ecodesign for Capella.

The approach has been validated through a realistic use case: a fictitious drone inspection product line, adapted from literature and the publicly available AIDA model from IRT Saint Exupéry. The add-on enabled seamless data integration, streamlined traceability of environmental attributes, and empowered architects to perform design-impactful trade-offs without leaving their MBSE environment.