Abstract: The emission of greenhouse gases (GHGs) is an important cause of climate change problem, which has become the common challenges facing human society. The design phase of a product has an important impact on the environment during its life cycle, and the design and development of a low GHGs emission product is crucial for mitigating climate change. To this end, this paper focuses on the procedure of product low carbon design, namely, design- assessment -redesign, and discusses current hot issues of product low-carbon design from four aspects, i.e., modeling, carbon footprint assessment, decision-making and optimization and low carbon design tools. Moreover, the future research trends of product low carbon design are discussed from the following aspects with the problem of complex information association, dynamic inventory data, complex optimization process, and independent design tools: 1) the life cycle integrated model considering the mapping association mechanism, 2) the carbon footprint assessment on the basis of design scenarios, 3) multi-objective and and multi-stage decision making and optimization for low-carbon design, and 4) the integrated tool of low-carbon design.

Key words: product low carbon design, design information modeling, carbon footprint assessment, low carbon decision making and optimization, low carbon design tool