A Generic Sankey Tool for Evaluating Energy Value Stream in Manufacturing Systems

Abstract

Sustainability has become one of the competitive strategies for today's manufacturers who are proactively seeking solutions to evaluate and improve their performances from both economic and environmental perspectives. As a result, a number of researchers have proposed the concept of Energy Value Stream Mapping (EVSM). However, the economic and environmental aspects were previously evaluated and presented individually. Therefore, this paper presents the development of an integrated tool to evaluate and visualise complex flows in a manufacturing system from the energy, material and time perspectives. A generic Sankey diagram platform is built to connect with existing databases (e.g. ERP) for a continuous analysis. An Australian aluminium recycling company is presented to demonstrate the developed tool.