Towards a Holistic Life Cycle Costing and Assessment of Factories: Qualitative Modeling of Interdependencies in Factory Systems

Abstract

Modern factory planning requires a holistic perspective taking economic as well as environmental sustainability over the entire factory life cycle into account. As a complex socio-technical system, the factory life cycle consists of multiple life cycles of the inherent factory elements. A holistic understanding of the individual life cycles and their interdependencies is missing for both planning and operation of a factory. Therefore, the goal is to develop a system understanding about life cycle-oriented factory planning and to analyze the contribution of relevant factory elements to the sustainability of a factory. As a result, a knowledge base for life cycle costing and assessment of the entire factory is established using an impact path model. The qualitative model supports factory planners in deriving planning measures for the sustainable design of a factory and in determining data requirements for the quantitative evaluation of the economic and environmental sustainability of a factory. It shows that the production and logistics concepts essentially define the sustainability potential during planning, while the resulting life cycle behavior of the process facilities and workers is responsible for the majority of costs and environmental impacts of a factory. Factory planners must therefore become aware of the implications of planning decisions on factory operation when developing concepts in the future.

Driving Manufacturing Companies toward Industry 5.0: A Strategic Framework for Process Technological Sustainability Assessment (P-TSA)

“…The company under consideration is an Italian ceramic tile manufacturer that has already implemented digital technologies as part of Industry 4.0 for several purposes. These include the transition to a circular economy model [42], real-time assessment of organizational environmental impact [43], organizational social impact [44], and the life cycle cost of the product [45].…”

How can industrial management contribute to a brighter future?

“…In production, disruptions are understood as unexpected temporary events whose occurrence and frequency cannot be predicted (Galaske/Anderl 2016, Stricker/Lanza 2014) and which prevent further work. An extended concept of disturbances sums up everything that prevents the factory from working optimally (Hingst et al 2023). Disturbance variables can be subdivided into categories such as human, machine, material, management, measurability, environment, and method, among others (Meyer et al 2013).…”

“…In order to perform the fault elimination more efficiently and economically, manufacturing execution systems (Hingst et al 2023) are used and approaches of manufacturing analytics are tested to be able to detect faults from the multitude of data provided by sensors (Denkena et al 2020, Jordan et al 2015. Finally, expert systems were built to increase efficiency and troubleshoot faults (Iwanek et al 2015).…”

Increasing Resilience in Factories: The Example of Disturbance Management – A Research Approach

“…In production, disruptions are understood as unexpected temporary events whose occurrence and frequency cannot be predicted (Galaske/Anderl 2016, Stricker/Lanza 2014) and which prevent further work. An extended concept of disturbances sums up everything that prevents the factory from working optimally (Hingst et al 2023). Disturbance variables can be subdivided into categories such as human, machine, material, management, measurability, environment, and method, among others (Meyer et al 2013).…”

“…In order to perform the fault elimination more efficiently and economically, manufacturing execution systems (Hingst et al 2023) are used and approaches of manufacturing analytics are tested to be able to detect faults from the multitude of data provided by sensors (Denkena et al 2020, Jordan et al 2015. Finally, expert systems were built to increase efficiency and troubleshoot faults (Iwanek et al 2015).…”