Sustainable manufacturing: Modeling and optimization challenges at the product, process and system levels

Achieving sustainability in manufacturing requires a holistic view spanning not just the product, and the manufacturing processes involved in its fabrication, but also the entire supply chain, including the manufacturing systems across multiple product life-cycles. This requires improved models, metrics for sustainability evaluation, and optimization techniques at the product, process, and system levels. This paper presents an overview of recent trends and new concepts in the development of sustainable products, processes and systems. In particular, recent trends in developing improved sustainability scoring methods for products and processes, and predictive models and optimization techniques for sustainable manufacturing processes, focusing on dry, near-dry and cryogenic machining as examples, are presented. (C) 2010 CIRP.