Human-Centric Green Design for automatic production lines: Using virtual and augmented reality to integrate industrial data and promote sustainability

The rapid evolution from Industry 4.0 to Industry 5.0 has heightened the need for integrating sustainability practices within complex system designs, particularly in the manufacturing sector. The research presents the development of a Sustainability Digital Twin (SDT) framework aimed at enhancing sustainable design practices for complex engineering systems. This framework integrates digital product models with sustainability indicators and uses Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) to promote Green Design principles. The approach begins with the definition of specific Sustainability Key Performance Indicators (S-KPIs) obtained by Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) tools. After that, using VR and AR allows to design and develop customized interactive dashboards to provide a comprehensive overview of sustainability indicators across the social, environmental, and economic dimensions, and to support decision-making along the product lifecycle. A core element of this transdisciplinary methodology is the adoption of a human-centered design philosophy, ensuring that user interfaces are intuitive and user-friendly, to Green Design tools, with the support of advanced digital technologies. The integration of human-machine interaction models aims at extending the current Green Design practices, mainly focused on environmental performances, towards social areas, including human-centric aspects such as usability, accessibility, comfort and pleasure in use. The research applies the proposed transdisciplinary approach to an industrial case study on automatic production lines, focusing on the ceramics industry, developed in collaboration with a world leading company in this sector. The case study highlighted the potential of combining SDT and AR/VR to create a dynamic and interactive platform for sustainable co-design, ultimately contributing to the advancement of Green Design practices in the ceramic industry and providing a scalable model for other industries aiming to achieve similar goals.