Decision Making for Sustainable Manufacturing

Enhancing sustainable manufacturing requires considering the variety of factors that influence the economic, environmental, and societal factors and assessing the trade-offs involved to identify the most effective strategies that can enhance desirable performance. Depending on the scope, sustainable manufacturing performance improvement decisions can focus on the product, process or systems levels as well as at the intersection of these domains. This chapter examines decision making needs at the at these different levels to enhance sustainable manufacturing performance. Various tools are available to evaluate the influential factors and enable more effective sustainable manufacturing decision making are presented. Application examples are used to demonstrate the application of the tools.