A general framework for sustainability assessment of manufacturing processes

Abstract The manufacturing sector has a major impact on the three sustainability dimensions represented by social, economic, and environmental aspects. Most of the work on sustainability assessment in the field of manufacturing is conducted at the product level or for specific processes; mainly machining with a limited number of indicators that do not capture all three dimensions of sustainability. The aim of this work is to develop a new systematic and comprehensive framework for sustainability assessment of manufacturing processes that covers the three sustainability dimensions. Guidelines to select and quantify the relevant indicators, convert the quantified weighted indicators into dimensionless quantities, and rank the alternatives based on the aggregated scores are presented. The proposed framework combines objective and subjective weighting methods to reduce the uncertainty associated with subjective weighting. It also captures the interaction among different indicators by utilizing multi criteria decision making methods instead of the traditional statistical methods. Sensitivity analysis is proposed to ensure the reliability and robustness of the aggregated results (final scores).