Towards a New Model of Sustainable Production: ManuFuturing

Abstract

Mutations of the context: economy, society, technology; call for continuous changes of products and related processes. Industry response must range from strategic to tactic horizons. The growing importance of environment and social aspects has lead to the emergence of the life cycle concept and to Sustainable Industrial Production. The Products-Processes life cycle matrix must then change to respond to mutations of the context. It may follow a stepwise path combining innovation (new generations) and evolution (within a generation). An appropriate system is required: the Virtual’ Factory. It “produces” and “maintains” new generations. The combination of a Virtual Factory and a Physical Factory, is the Self-Innovating Factory (SIF). Because of products-process complexity, networks, made up of “physical factories”, are emerging. To respond to context changes, appropriate, Virtual Factories networks should be implemented. The integration of both networks would lead to the Self-Innovating Extended Factory (SEIF), capable of responding to context changes, as required by Sustainable Production Paradigm. The model described has been named MANURITURING. The main phases to implement and some of the methods and tools to support it, have been described. The model has been adopted by an industrial group to develop its next generation of manufacturing systems.