The use of product families can improve the efficiency of product development as opposed to develop a singleproduct by reusing existing artefacts and optimizing variability, which leads to a saving of resources and is therefore a sustainable approach. To extend new variants of an already modelled product via the approach of a product family the challenge is to merge the product models, so that the same and varying parts in the model are semantically correct identified and mapped to each other. This paper proposes a comprehensive approach for sustainable development of product families using the Distributed Ontology Language (DOL), Functional Architectures for Systems (FAS), and Systems Modeling Language (SysML). The proposed approach integrates the idea of DOL to represent an ontology of sustainability criteria and to map them to the functional architecture of a product family. FAS is used to model the functional architecture of the product family, while the FAS ontology is used to formalize the functional architecture and provide a standardized vocabulary and set of rules for modelling the functional aspects of the product family. SysML is used to model the product family. The proposed method is demonstrated through a case study of developing a sustainable product family of vacuum cleaner robots. The results show that the proposed method can help to identify opportunities for reducing environmental impact and improving social responsibility in the product family design while ensuring that functional requirements and design constraints are met semantically correct.