A Sustainable Reconfigurable Manufacturing System Designing With Focus On Environmental Hazardous Wastes

Due to awakening environmental awareness and corresponding tightening of environmental protocols in the industrialized world, new production challenges arise. These challenges are to meet the continuously growing worldwide demand for capital and consumer goods while considering the associated economic, environmental, and social aspects. The next generation manufacturing systems must adjust themselves rapidly and cost-effectively. The goal is to respond to changing market needs while minimizing adverse effects on the environment. Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems (RMSs) —due to its flexibility and characteristics— can increase the system sustainability and responsiveness to satisfy the market needs. In this paper, we propose an environmental oriented multi-objective problem for a sustainable reconfigurable manufacturing system. As design objectives, we consider the total production time, the total production cost and the amount of environmental hazardous wastes. The environmental hazardous wastes considers both liquid hazardous waste and greenhouse gas emissions (GHG). Weighted goal programming is used to tackle this multi-objective problem. The applicability of our approach is illustrated through a numerical example.