Drafting a cost-effective approach towards a sustainable manufacturing system design

Abstract Decision makers are being increasingly motivated to improve their manufacturing systems in coping efficiently with the objectives of sustainable development and the current manufacturing system designers or researchers face a choice to either incorporate the new regulations of sustainability into the existing systems or leave the field for new players. Consideration of the sustainability aspect in developing manufacturing systems could potentially reduce the impact of environmental wastes. Design of a sustainable manufacturing systems (SMS) can be partially achieved through the implementation of lean methods to reduce manufacturing wastes and operational costs, while improving system productivity. On the other hand, such methods of leanness do not encounter environmental wastes particularly to energy usage and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions ofa lean manufacturing system. This work overcomes these shortcomings in developing a SMS towards the minimization of total cost, energy consumption and environmental impact, in particular, of the CO2 emissions. The design problem was modelled as a multi-objective programming model under economic and ecological constraints. The developed model is also associated with the number of machines required for operating processes along with the quantity of flow of material for processing the products in a manufacturing system. An integrated decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL)-e-constraint approach and the goal programming approach were used to derive two sets of non-inferior solutions. Finally, a real case study was used for examining the applicability of the developed SMS model.