An integrated framework for assessment of sustainable manufacturing

Sustainable manufacturing systems should be profitable and environmentally friendly while being safe both physically and socially for everyone in the system. This paper highlights the main aspects and requirements of sustainability, which are related to manufacturing systems, demonstrating that there are other aspects of sustainability in general that are not reflective on manufacturing. The paper also highlights many useful assessment indices of manufacturing sustainability, which makes quantification, and then comparison and optimization of system performance possible. A comparative study on the existing sustainability assessment tools is performed to classify these tools based on appropriateness to manufacturing systems and limitations. The paper also reviews the significant research work in system modeling for assessing and optimizing manufacturing sustainability. The review has revealed that the triple bottom line TBL factors, economic, social and environmental, are difficult to evaluate and optimize simultaneously due to the complex nature of manufacturing systems and the wide variety of processes and type of the system. Furthermore, the review has demonstrated that there is significant research gap in considering social sustainability for overall sustainability characterization. This paper presents a new integrated framework to connect the economic, environmental and social factors, and to optimize sustainability performance of the system by balancing these factors. The consideration and the integration of social sustainability with other factors make this framework unique and more functional. Finally, the scope of future research work is also presented for the proposed framework.