Sustainable manufacturing process planning

Environmental factors have a major role in selecting an optimal process planning schema. However, the systems that are currently available are barely capable of dealing with these environmental issues. In this paper, an automated evaluation tool based on environmental standards has been developed so that it is capable of identifying and quantifying the environmental impacts of a set of feasible manufacturing process plans and is able to select a near-optimal solution (out of the feasible set) for a desired process plan of a given part. The selection methodology is based on the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and has considered three main factors: emission, waste production, and hazardous materials to arrive at a selection. The proposed technique has been written in detail in the following paper and has been illustrated with appropriate case studies.