Metrics-based hierarchical approach for sustainable manufacturing systems performance evaluation

This paper presents an approach to evaluate sustainable manufacturing performance at line, plant and enterprise levels. First, requirements for a sustainable manufacturing evaluation framework are identified through reviewing existing literature. A framework to concurrently consider the three pillars of sustainability, total life-cycle emphasis, and 6R (reduce, reuse, recycle, recover, redesign and remanufacture) concept is then developed. The framework is used to propose index-based methods for sustainable manufacturing performance evaluation. Metrics for economic, environmental and societal performance measurement are progressively aggregated to determine performance at sub-cluster, cluster, sub-index, index levels. The proposed approach allows to integrate metrics relevant to product and process performance to evaluate systems level sustainable manufacturing from the line to plant to enterprise level. The application of the proposed approach is illustrated using two examples.