Decision Support for Enhancement of Manufacturing Sustainability: A Hierarchical Control Approach

Abstract

From the sustainability science point of view, improvement of manufacturing sustainability involves a series of system (performance) state transitions in a sustainable development (SD) space. The transitions occur based on the system information obtained through stage-wised sustainability assessment and the actions on the system taken based on the derived stagewised decisions. From the standpoint of control engineering, this is a multiobjective system control problem. In this paper, we introduce a general decision-support framework for deriving strategies to achieve short-to-longterm sustainability goals. In this framework, a two-layered hierarchical control scheme is introduced to implement strategic and tactical control for dynamic sustainability control. A comprehensive case study on biodiesel manufacturing is illustrated to demonstrate methodological efficacy.

Review of Methods for Sustainability Assessment of Chemical Engineering Processes

“…Possible treatments can include redesigning the process to utilize renewable feedstocks, benign chemical reagents, and greener manufacturing schemes. Recently, these metrics, serving as sustainability accessors, also have been integrated in process–control schemes to provide strategic decision makers who determine sustainable options with insights into dynamic behavior of processes and operational range for optimization. − A combination of the approaches commonly used for separately assessing different aspects of sustainability has been widely practiced providing flexibility for users to assemble their own sustainability metrics in applications. , It is worth mentioning that completing comprehensive assessments for all aspects requires excessively large amounts of time, data, knowledge, and resources. It, therefore, follows that implementation is always a balance between sophistication and effectiveness and can be varied depending on the adoption pattern and data availability.…”

Sustainability Assessment in Manufacturing for Effectiveness: Challenges and Opportunities

“…A holistic SA framework to capture value across the manufacturing networks has been developed (Bocken et al, 2013). Further, a control engineering-based decision-support systems framework to improve the sustainability of manufacturing industries has also been developed (Moradi-Aliabadi and Huang, 2018). A strong sustainability-oriented framework for manufacturing has been proposed (Pinto et al, 2020).…”

Decision-Making for Sustainability Enhancement of Chemical Systems under Uncertainties: Combining the Vector-Based Multiattribute Decision-Making Method with Weighted Multiobjective Optimization Technique

“…While an optimization paradigm for the synthesis of chemical processes with product distribution optimization was introduced by Gong and You, in which, a multiobjective mixed-integer nonlinear program (MINLP) is used for designing the most sustainable process. Recently, Moradi-Aliabadi and Huang considered the technology-based retrofitting of the chemical systems as a MOO problem with the environmental, economic, and social objectives, where the Pareto set of the MOO model can be obtained by using the ε constraint method, offering the decision makers a feasible route to select the best solution for enhancing the system’s sustainability.…”