Configurational product life-cycle management (PLM) for sustainability: Embedding carbon-aware decision rules in product design

Industrial firms face a dual challenge: delivering highly customized products while meeting ambitious decarbonisation targets. Although product configurators accelerate variant definition and quoting, sustainability metrics are rarely integrated into configuration logic, leaving life-cycle impacts unaddressed at the point of design choice. This paper asks: How can sustainability objectives be embedded as executable decision logic within product configurators? We introduce integrated configurational PLM, a governance approach that embeds life-cycle carbon metrics directly into configurator rule systems, linking configuration logic, PLM traceability, and module-level LCA data. Empirically, we combine a multi-firm field study with a quasi-experimental digital twin to evaluate how carbon-aware rules influence configuration outcomes. Across 1000 synthetic orders, sustainability-aware rules reduce embodied (A1–A3) emissions by 10–20% and increase module reuse by 15–25%, with a modest increase in processing time (+18%). Monte Carlo analysis indicates that these effects remain robust under realistic LCA uncertainty. The findings demonstrate that configurators can evolve from feasibility tools into multi-criteria decision systems that operationalize carbon-aware design. The paper contributes (i) a mechanism for embedding sustainability into configurator rule logic, (ii) empirical evidence of its impact on variant outcomes, and (iii) design principles for integrating and governing LCA data within PLM-enabled configuration environments.