Smart and Sustainable Manufacturing Systems最新文献

Over the past century, research has focused on continuously improving the performance of manufacturing processes and systems-often measured in terms of cost, quality, productivity, and material and energy efficiency. With the advent of smart manufacturing technologies-better production equipment, sensing technologies, computational methods, and data analytics applied from the process to enterprise levels-the potential for sustainability performance improvement is tremendous. Sustainable manufacturing seeks the best balance of a variety of performance measures to satisfy and optimize the goals of all stakeholders. Accurate measures of performance are the foundation on which sustainability objectives can be pursued. Historically, operational and information technologies have undergone disparate development, with little convergence across the domains. To focus future research efforts in advanced manufacturing, the authors organized a one-day workshop, sponsored by the U.S. National Science Foundation, at the joint manufacturing research conferences of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and Society of Manufacturing Engineers. Research needs were identified to help harmonize disparate manufacturing metrics, models, and methods from across conventional manufacturing, nanomanufacturing, and additive/hybrid manufacturing processes and systems. Experts from academia and government labs presented invited lightning talks to discuss their perspectives on current advanced manufacturing research challenges. Workshop participants also provided their perspectives in facilitated brainstorming breakouts and a reflection activity. The aim was to define advanced manufacturing research and educational needs for improving manufacturing process performance through improved sustainability metrics, modeling approaches, and decision support methods. In addition to these workshop outcomes, a review of the recent literature is presented, which identifies research opportunities across several advanced manufacturing domains. Recommendations for future research describe the short-, mid-, and long-term needs of the advanced manufacturing community for enabling smart and sustainable manufacturing.

The unique and unprecedented challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic have resulted in significant disruptions to diverse manufacturing supply chains across the globe. The negative economic impacts of these unexpected and rapid changes in demand and available supplies have been severe, and the economic sustainability of many businesses has been revealed as being highly sensitive to such changes. COVID-19 will inevitably change manufacturing, and potentially in a way that is not sustainable unless we factor sustainability into our "redesign." Otherwise, the industry will remain overwhelmed in a reactionary cycle when the next major problem emerges, such as a lack of resources during a natural or man-made disaster. In this article, we present strategies for addressing three sustainability challenges relevant to manufacturing introduced by the COVID-19 pandemic: 1) an increase in waste generation, 2) uncertainty in life cycle impacts, and 3) navigating new modes of operation for manufacturing. To mitigate the sustainability challenges of COVID-19 and create a more resilient industrial sector, we need to assess the potential of each risk to product development and production processes. We envision a systematic integration of sustainable manufacturing principles and metrics into the business practices of manufacturing enterprises, including the products they produce and the processes used to create them. Realizing this vision will require greater availability and transparency of key data related to environmental and social sustainability factors, to create a clean and sustainable future in which pandemic and disaster readiness is realized through sustainable manufacturing.

Economic value added is a primary metric for measuring manufacturing activity; however, this metric and others exclude approximately half of the economic activity necessary for producing manufactured goods. With the recent disruption in the supply of goods and services by the COVID-19 pandemic, the criticality of these supply chains to production has become more apparent. Measuring and understanding these additional activities is foundational to reducing the effect of supply chain disruption. Additionally, manufacturing supply chains are fundamental to any response to the virus, including the production of masks, tests, and eventually a vaccine. When looked at closely, manufacturing stands out as a key driver of our economy. New manufacturing technologies can be leveraged to differentiate products in multiple ways resulting in a greater variety of products made more efficiently, with less environmental impacts, and higher quality. In addition, the digitization of manufacturing supports supply chains that are more connected, anticipatory, and agile. Metrics are needed that better reflect the role manufacturing plays in society, that better identify the social gains manufacturing produces, and that better establish the total economic activity that drives production. In this paper we propose a macro-economic metric to better measure the influence of manufacturing on our economy as an example of one such measure. We argue a need for solidifying similar radical changes to our current ways of measuring manufacturing's relevance and emphasizing the impact of new technologies that support the manufacturing economic sector.