Manufacturing Process Information Models for Sustainable Manufacturing

Abstract

Sustainable manufacturing systems use processes, methodologies, and technologies that are energy efficient and environmentally friendly. To create and maintain such systems, well-defined measurement methodologies and corresponding manufacturing information models play a crucial role to consistently compute and evaluate sustainability performance indicators of manufacturing processes that will result in reliable decision support. However, when it comes to describing sustainability of product manufacturing, the presently available methods and tools do not account for manufacturing processes explicitly and hence result in inaccurate and ambiguous decisions between alternate systems. Furthermore, there are no formal methods for acquiring and exchanging sustainability-related information that help establish a consolidated sustainability information base for decision support. This paper presents a study on the scope of the currently available manufacturing information models to incorporate sustainability. Identifying the requirements for information models that cater to sustainable manufacturing was done utilizing an earlier developed Systems Integration for Manufacturing Applications (SIMA) reference architecture model. We propose an extension to the SIMA architecture considering sustainability and refer to it as a GreenSIMA architecture. We present injection-molding unit manufacturing process as an example.