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Abstract: Sustainable development is seeking to meet the needs of the present without compromising those of future generations. The need to integrate the principles, values, and practices of sustainable development into all aspects of manufacturing, in order to address the social, economic, cultural and environmental problems is felt widely among the industrialized society. Selecting or identifying a suitable material or manufacturing processes is one way of achieving sustainability of a product by reducing its end of life impacts to a possible extent. But technological changes are unpredictable and so predicting future possible environmental impacts are highly difficult. This paper tries to explore the potential of environmental impact minimisation using alternative materials and alternative manufacturing processes. A case study has been carried out to in this regard in an Indian automotive component manufacturing organization. The results indicate that change in material has higher impact over the manufacturing process in reducing the environmental impact. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Fault tree analysis (FTA) is a technique that describes the combinations of events in a system which result in an undesirable outcome. FTA is used as a tool to quantitatively assess a system''s probability for an undesirable outcome. Time constraints from concept to production in modern engineering often limit the opportunity for a thorough statistical analysis of a system. Furthermore, when undesirable outcomes are considered such as hazard to human(s), it becomes difficult to identify strict statistical targets for what is acceptable. Consequently, when hazard to human(s) is concerned a common design target is to protect the system from single points of failure (SPOF) which means that no failure mode caused by a single event, concern, or error has a critical consequence on the system. Such a design target is common with “by-wire” systems. FTA can be used to verify if a system is protected from SPOF. In this paper, sufficient criteria for evaluating protection from SPOF for partially expanded fault trees are proposed along with proof. The proposed criteria consider potential interactions between the lowest drawn events of a partial fault tree expansion which otherwise easily leads to an overly optimistic analysis of protection from SPOF. The analysis is limited to fault trees that are coherent and static. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]