Abstract
Quantification of a highly qualitative term ‘sustainability’, especially from the perspective of manufacturing, is a contemporary issue. An inference mechanism, based on approximate reasoning, is required to tackle the complexities and uncertainties of the manufacturing domain. The work presents development of a fuzzy rule-based system to quantify sustainability of the most widely utilized manufacturing process: machining. The system incorporates the effects of key control parameters of machining on several sustainability measures, as reported in the literature. The measures are categorized under the three dimensions of sustainability and contribute to the sustainability scores of the respective dimensions with different weightages. The dimensions’ scores are added up in different proportions to obtain the holistic sustainability score of the process. The categories of the control parameters incorporated into the system include type of the process, work material, material hardness, tool substrate and coating, tool geometry, cutting fluids, and cutting parameters. The proposed method yields sustainability scores, ranging between 0 and 100 of machining processes against the given values of their prominent control parameters. Finally, the rule-based system is applied to three different machining processes to obtain the measures of their accomplishment levels regarding economic, environmental, and societal dimensions of sustainability. The sustainability score of each process is then obtained by summing up the three accomplishment levels under the respective weightages of the dimensions. The presented approach holds immense potentials of industrial application as it can conveniently indicate the current sustainability level of a manufacturing process, leading the practitioners to decide on its continuation or improvement.
Highlights
The issues concerning environmental degradation, such as emissions of greenhouse gases, landfilling, global warming, water pollution, and depletion of natural resources have gained massive attention during the last couple of decades
The technology is known to degrade the environment in a number of ways, such as consumption of electrical energy that leads to generation of more energy and subsequent emission of greenhouse gases, generation of processing waste that needs cleaning, recycling, and landfilling, depletion of natural resources in form of scarce metals which are used in making of cutting tools, and pollution of land and water through disposal of cutting fluids
The sets for the cutting parameters consist of five members whereas the others consist of only three because the effects of the Figure 2 presents the triangular fuzzy sets for all the numeric control parameters, namely work surface hardness, rake angle, helix angle, drill diameter, cutting speed, feed rate, and depth of cut
Summary
The issues concerning environmental degradation, such as emissions of greenhouse gases, landfilling, global warming, water pollution, and depletion of natural resources have gained massive attention during the last couple of decades. The articles undertaking a particular manufacturing technology, such as machining, have considered only a particular class of control parameters for the sake of sustainability assessment In this context, a research gap needs to be filled by considering all the three dimensions of sustainability and including all the influential control parameters of a manufacturing process for estimation of its sustainability. An all-inclusive approach rules out analytical modeling in respect of a complex physical process, the approximations actualized by fuzzy reasoning are obviously productive. In this regard, the current work presents development of a fuzzy reasoning system, comprising IFTHEN rules, to estimate a sustainability score (SS) of machining processes by incorporating effects of all the significant parameters on the three dimensions of sustainability: economy, environment, and society
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