Sustainable and Smart Manufacturing: An Integrated Approach

Abstract

The necessity for decreasing the negative impact of the manufacturing industry has recently increased. This is getting recognized as a global challenge due to the rapid increase in life quality standards, demand, and the decrease in available resources. Thus, manufacturing, as a core of the product provision system and a fundamental pillar of civilized existence, is significantly influenced by sustainability issues. Furthermore, current manufacturing modeling and assessment criteria require intensive revisions and upgrades to keep up with these new challenges. Nearly all current manufacturing models are based on the old paradigm, which was proven to be inadequate. Therefore, manufacturing technology, along with culture and economy, are held responsible for providing new tools and opportunities for building novel resolutions towards a sustainable manufacturing concept. One of such tools is sustainability assessment measures. Revising and updating such tools is a core responsibility of the manufacturing sector to efficiently evaluate and enhance sustainable manufacturing performance. These measures should be adequate to respond to the growing sustainability concerns in pursuit of an integrated sustainability concept. The triple bottom line (TBL) that includes environment, economic, and social dimensions has usually been used to evaluate sustainability. However, there is a lack of standard sets of sustainable manufacturing performance measures. In addition to the sustainability concept, a new concept of smart manufacturing is emerging. The smart manufacturing concept takes advantage of the recent technological leap in Artificial Intelligent (AI), Cloud Computing (CC), and the Internet of Things (IoT). Although this concept offers an important step to boost the current production capabilities to meet the growing need, it is still not clear whether the two concepts of smart manufacturing and sustainability will constructively or destructively interact. Therefore, the current study aims to integrate the sustainable smart manufacturing performance by incorporating sustainable manufacturing measures and discussing current and future challenges that are faced by the manufacturing sector. In addition, the opportunities for future research incorporating sustainable smart manufacturing are also presented.