Sustainable Design and Manufacturing: A Multiscale Complex Systems Approach

The quest for manufacturing sustainability demands a crucial paradigm shift from the traditional techno-economic focused, macroscale featured paradigm to triple-bottom-lines-based sustainable system design, manufacturing, and management at various length-time scales.  Apparently, this is an extremely very challenging task, as it involves multiscale sustainability assessment and decision making, usually under uncertainty of information and domain knowledge.  In this presentation, the research frontiers in manufacturing sustainability research will be discussed first.  Then, an integrated, multiscale sustainable design and manufacturing methodology will be introduced, which is being developed by resorting to basic sustainability science, multiscale complex systems theory, uncertainty theory, and control theory.  The methodology can be used to perform hierarchical system modeling, comprehensive sustainability analysis, and multiscale decision making under uncertainty.  The methodological efficacy will be demonstrated by a few case studies, ranging from sustainable design of nanomaterials, to profitable pollution prevention in surface coating systems, and to industrial-zone-based technology network sustainability.