As environmental and social awareness in production engineering rises, sustainability in discrete manufacturing processes has to be controlled better and enhanced. Sustainability indicators offer a simple and affordable solution for quickly assessing sustainability; however, they have been employed rarely on the process level. This study selects simple and relevant sustainability indicators and discusses different means of normalization. The sustainability indicators can be displayed as a performance profile, which is individual to each manufacturing process variant. In addition, the indicators can be simplified to one sustainability indicator through a utility analysis allowing for a quick comparison between different process variants. The whole procedure is executed with a grinding process case study. This work provides a straightforward method for evaluating sustainability of discrete manufacturing processes.
It is believed that for complex workpieces and small lot sizes complete machining with multi-technology platforms reduces cycle times compared to multiple standalone machines and is economically more efficient. However, so far in literature no mathematical model has been applied to compare these alternatives with respect to cost and productivity. This paper introduces a mathematical model for part costs and productivity and examines conditions under which multi-technology platforms are economically efficient. It is concluded that depending on the reduction of reconfiguration and processing times efficient production with multi-technology platforms is not solely limited to small lot sizes.
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