Bonvoisin Jérémy - Sustainable manufacturing: challenges, solutions and implementation perspectives

Chair of Industrial Information Technology, Institute for Machine-tools and Factory Management, Technische Universitt Berlin, Berlin, Germany

Chair of Assembly Technology and Factory Management, Institute for Machine-tools and Factory Management, Technische Universitt Berlin, Berlin, Germany

creation of discrete manufactured products that in fulfilling their functionality over their entire life cycle cause a manageable amount of impacts on the environment (nature and society) while delivering economic and societal value.

Since the emergence of the first initiatives explicitly termed as green engineering or sustainable manufacturing, several reviews of the field have been undertaken and frameworks have been proposed that identify the complementary areas of research that need to be addressed. Jayal et al. () made recommendations for further research on sustainable manufacturing, based on the review of existing initiatives and considering two foci: manufacturing processes and equipment along with manufacturing systems.

It is worth noting that all these reviews identify both sustainability assessment methods and technical strategies ( analysis and synthesis ) as necessary and complementary approaches to sustainable manufacturing. Analytical approaches are required in order to put words and figures to the problems which may ultimately be solved by synthesis. One example of this is found in the inventory of approaches for energy efficient manufacturing at the unit process level given by Duflou et al. (), where data acquisition, computational models and energy assessment methods stand alongside technical solutions such as technological change or waste recovery within the machine tool. Two of the four publications go further, and state that analysis and synthesis approaches can only be effective if enabled by adapted education tactics. On one side of the equation, a systematic implementation of analysis and synthesis approaches in industry requires that engineers fully appreciate the sustainable manufacturing concepts and are trained in multi-objective decision-making. On the other side, the general public can only foster sustainable production if they fully appreciate the impact of their consumption patterns.

While such reviews identify different yet overlapping scopes, the sustainable manufacturing solutions they identify can be classified into four different areas, which we will call for our purposes layers :