Combining sustainability criteria with discrete event simulation

This paper attempts to highlight shortcomings in the concept of sustainability and ways to make the concept more workable by presenting the development of an Environmental Management Information System (EMIS) as a combination of discrete event simulation and ecological material flow analysis for production processes. The motivation behind the focus on simulation techniques on one hand and on production processes on the other, is the understanding that the current metabolic rates of today's economies are beginning to affect the life-sustaining services of the earth. Dematerialization and resource efficiency are mandatory concepts in the coming decades, hence the production processes; simulation techniques are needed as existing systems cannot be easily changed to be experimented with. There is however a lack of simulation systems addressing sustainability as a whole. This paper intends to show ways on how to connect supposedly opposite factors and thus getting closer to the so called immeasurable: sustainability.

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