Manufacturing decisions are currently made based on considerations of cost, time and quality. However there is increasing pressure to also routinely incorporate environmental considerations into the decision making processes. Despite the existence of a number of tools for environmental analysis of manu-facturing activities, there does not appear to be a structured approach for gener-ating relevant environmental information that can be fed into manufacturing decision making. This research proposes an overarching structure that leads to three approaches, pertaining to different timescales that enable the generation of environmental information, suitable for consideration during decision making. The approaches are demonstrated through three industrial case studies.
History
School
Mechanical, Electrical and Manufacturing Engineering
Published in
International Conference on Sustainable Design and Manufacturing
Citation
WOOLLEY, E., SIMEONE, A. and RAHIMIFARD, S., 2017. Eco-intelligent factories: Timescales for environmental decision support. IN: Campana, G., Howlett, R.J., Setchi, R., Cimatti, B. (eds). Sustainable Design and Manufacturing 2017, Bologna, Italy, 26th-28th April 2017, pp. 325-338.
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Acceptance date
2017-01-08
Publication date
2017
Notes
This is a pre-copyedited version
of a contribution published in Campana, G., Howlett, R.J., Setchi, R., Cimatti, B. (eds). Sustainable Design and Manufacturing 2017 published by Springer. The definitive authenticated version is available online via This paper was presented at the International Conference on Sustainable Design and Manufacturing (SDM-17), Bologna, Italy, 26-28th April 2017.