Application of Industry 4.0 to enhance sustainable manufacturing

The proliferation of cyber-physical systems introduces the fourth stage of industrialization, commonly known as Industry 4.0. There are many framework and researches have been conducted to implement the concept of Industry 4.0 in a customized way for different manufacturing and service requirements. In this article, a smart factory framework is presented by vertical integration of various components that incorporates industrial network, cloud, and supervisory control terminals with different functions, such as production, maintenance, energy consumption, water consumption, and so on, in a factory for optimizing resource utilization and eliminating all type wastages to enhance sustainable manufacturing. Moreover, this kind of self-organized system enables the factory to achieve higher efficiency, minimized negative environmental impacts and improvements in other key performance indicators. To evaluate the outcome of this model implementation, a case study has been conducted on a cement plant where it is evident that after implementation of this model of sustainable manufacturing system the key environmental performance indicators such as specific energy consumption, carbon footprint, specific water consumption was reduced. It is observed that after implementing the sustainable manufacturing techniques, there is a substantial improvement in various performance indicators, those are, production volume of the factory was increased by 13.24%, process waste percentage came down by 12.79%, OEE improved by 12.94%. The major environmental performance parameters like specific energy consumption came down by 9.33%, specific carbon foot print came down by 9.33% and specific water consumption came down by 3.12% after implementing the sustainable manufacturing model.