Chapter 1 - Sustainable and fractal manufacturing systems: complexity minimization when sustainability and Industry 4.0 interact

Abstract

Sustainable production systems have made available technologies that enable conservation of raw materials, reduction in energy consumption, prevention of pollution, and protection of the health and safety of the population. Their efficient integration into conventional production systems increases the complexity of the tasks that are related to the design, development and management of the life cycle of products and processes. The most recent scientific works reveal that the theoretical foundations, models, and experimental research do not achieve efficient solutions to be able to implement sustainability in manufacturing. This situation is linked to the management of complexity: those to take into consideration are the large number of strategies, activities, processes, information and data, the multidimensionality of the control parameters and the performance requirements, making the balanced integration of the three sustainable dimensions (economy, ecology, and equity) still not viable neither technically nor economically. This chapter proposes a framework to guide the design and development of sustainable and fractal manufacturing systems (SF|Ms), managing the complexity through their configuration, as with natural ecosystems. The model uses the principles of the fractal theory to create sustainable and fractal manufacturing systems (SF|FS) architectures with minimum complexity, thus being an opportunity to adapt the production systems to the new complex contexts of Industry 4.0.