Live LCA in learning factories: real time assessment of product life cycles environmental impacts

Abstract As manufacturing increasingly faces a shift of paradigm towards sustainability, a comprehensive understanding of the environmental effects of industrial activities becomes essential. Training programs for current and future engineers in this field required tools and methodologies that contributes making this complexity more tangible and understandable. In this paper we present a concept to perform real time product life cycle assessments in a learning factory. The methodology combines the cyber-physical infrastructure of the learning factory with computational models that enable estimating and tracing the environmental impact of a product system as well as the interdependencies with different production parameters.