Brief Overview of Collaborative Approaches in Sustainable Manufacturing

Abstract

The manufacturing sector is experiencing a profound transformation as reflected in the Industry 4.0 movement, combined with the growing societal concerns for sustainability. This trend has led to the notion of sustainable manufacturing. On the other hand, the increasing interconnectivity among organisations, people, and physical systems, supported by recent developments in communication technologies, points to the important role that collaborative networks have in the ongoing digital transformation processes. As such, this paper analyses the synergies between sustainable manufacturing and collaborative networks. More specifically, the goal is to analyse how the responsibility for the various facets of sustainability can be distributed among the multiple entities involved in manufacturing. This study is based on both literature survey and our experience in various research projects in the area and is organised according to the typical six dimensions of Industry 4.0. The work is complemented with a brief summary of proposed indicators to measure sustainability under this networked manufacturing perspective.

Collaborative approaches in sustainable and resilient manufacturing

“…In order to facilitate the aimed mapping and identification of synergies, next section introduces a classification of six dimensions of analysis for advanced manufacturing systems. This classification was first introduced in (Camarinha-Matos et al, 2021 ), but is discussed here under the perspective of analyzing the role of collaborative networks in sustainable manufacturing. These dimensions are later used to frame the findings on trends.…”

“…This article, which is an extended version of a preliminary presentation at PRO-VE 2021 (Camarinha-Matos et al, 2021 ), focuses on identifying and categorizing relevant trends and examples to help understand the synergies among the areas of manufacturing, collaborative networks, and sustainability. The remainder of the article is structured as follows: in the next section, a set of base concepts are briefly summarized in order to give a basis for the following sections; the following section discusses the role and opportunities for the adoption of collaborative networks models, principles, and mechanisms in the various dimensions of Industry 4.0 and the complementary vision of Industry 5.0; the article continues with two sections describing the main trends found in literature and example projects, as well as approaches and indicators to measure sustainability.…”

Grand challenges in industrial informatics

“…As these processes involve multiple stakeholders, in addition to appropriate collaboration and business models, it is necessary to determine how to distribute responsibility for the various dimensions of sustainability among these stakeholders. This also requires the development of sustainability-focused performance indicators and the implementation of data collection methods for the metrics involved (Camarinha-Matos et al, 2021) (Zhang et al, 2021) (Camarinha-Matos et al, 2022.…”