Sustainability has become a pervasive term in almost every field, especially in engineering design and manufacturing. An increased awareness of environmental problems and resource depletion has led to an emphasis on sustainable production. This is especially true in manufacturing industries where energy consumption and the amount of waste generated can be high. This requires proactive tools to be developed to carefully analyze the cause-effect of current manufacturing practices and to investigate alternative practices. Further, new approaches to systematically analyze the utilization and processing of manufacturing resources in a factory setting are becoming important. Modeling and simulation can potentially play an important role. However, there are gaps in the simulation tools used by industry to provide reliable results from which effective and equitable decisions can be made regarding environmental impacts at different stages of product realization and life cycle. Enhanced modeling techniques are needed to understand and predict the sustainability aspects through design and manufacturing where technologies can be applied to transform materials with reduced energy consumption, reduced emissions, reduced generation of waste products, and reduced use of non-renewable or toxic materials.
- Representative topics include:
- Modeling and simulation for sustainable production
- Metrics for measuring sustainable production performance
- Design for environment tools as it applied to production
- Life cycle assessment tools for modeling and simulation or processes
- Role of standards in sustainable production
- Data modeling for simulation and analysis
- Interoperability issues in modeling and simulation tools