Metrics, standards and industry best practices for sustainable manufacturing systems

Substantial global climate changes due to global warming and the growing rate resource depletion have compelled several researchers to focus their research in the area of sustainability. Ensuring a sustainable future requires a systems approach. Sustainable systems are characterized by interlinked interactions at various levels spanning economic, ecological and societal issues. Emphasis on interactions within and across these levels is critical to the fundamental understanding of sustainable design and manufacturing systems, because tackling any one of the issues in isolation can result in unintended consequences along other dimensions. Sustainable systems are best understood in terms of information across products, processes, management (operational) aspects. In this paper, we outline several issues related to sharing this information across engineering and business units. We outline the information infrastructural needs to realize sustainable manufacturing, namely, trusted system of measurement methods and metrics, information models, simulation models, databases for toxic materials, and manufacturing products/processes, standards and best practices relevant to sustainable manufacturing, and validation, simulation and testing methodologies for information models and standards.