(662c) A Decision Support Framework for Sustainable Manufacturing

From the sustainability science point of view, industrial sustainability involves a series of system state transitions in an economics-environment-society-based three-dimensional space. The study of system state transition requires methods for conducting continuous sustainability assessment, decision analysis, and decision making in order to derive best possible sustainability actions for implementation to achieve sustainability goals in different decision stages. In this paper, we introduce a new, general decision support framework for achieving short-to-long-term goals for sustainable manufacturing. This framework involves design of a decision-making system that can derive decisions at both the strategic planning and tactical control layers. The strategic planning is designed to assist decision makers in developing optimal short-to-long-term sustainability development (SD) strategies based on system sustainability performance, environmental regulation, etc. The tactical control, on the other hand, is constructed to derive optimal sustainability actions and implement SD strategies in a dynamic domain. Time series forecasting technique will be used to deal with various types of uncertainty information, such as that related to market, material/energy price, etc. This two-layer decision-making framework can provide a structured step-by-step guide to industry in defining SD strategies and deriving sustainability actions systematically. A comprehensive case study on nanocoating manufacturing sustainability is illustrated to demonstrate methodological efficacy.