Integrating Sustainable Manufacturing Assessment into Decision Making for a Production Work Cell

Sustainability has been the focus of intense discussions over the past two decades, with topics surrounding the entire product life cycle. In the manufacturing phase, research has often focused solely on environmental impact assessment or environmental impact and cost analysis in its assessment of sustainability. Few efforts have investigated sustainable production decision making that addresses the three pillars of sustainability concurrently; which requires engineers and managers to consider economic, environmental, and social impacts. An approach is developed to assess broader sustainability impacts by conducting economic assessment, environmental impact assessment, and social impact assessment at the work cell level. Assessment results are then integrated into a sustainable manufacturing assessment framework, along with a modified weighting method based on pairwise comparison and an outranking decision-making method. The approach is illustrated for a representative machining work cell producing stainless steel knives. Economic, environmental, and social impact results are compared for three production scenarios by applying the sustainable manufacturing assessment framework. The case study finds that cutting tool cost is the largest contributor to production costs for the investigated work cell. The level of environmental and social impact varies according to cycle time. Sensitivity analysis is conducted to examine the robustness of the results.