A Grey Box Software Framework for Sustainability Assessment of Composed Manufacturing Processes: A Hybrid Manufacturing Case.

A lack of consistent data, reliable analysis techniques, and user-friendly tools is inhibiting decision makers' abilities to assess and evaluate the sustainability performance of manufacturing processes and systems. Recent integration of information technology with advanced manufacturing technologies has led to a new paradigm, termed smart manufacturing or Industry 4.0. To leverage this paradigm shift for the advancement of sustainable manufacturing, efforts have been made to characterize unit manufacturing processes (UMPs) for sustainability assessment and to develop frameworks, methodologies, and standards utilizing information modeling approaches. This paper proposes a grey box object-oriented software framework for sustainability assessment of complex manufacturing systems, utilizing the multiple inheritance principle for composition of UMP models. Information modeling guidelines based on the framework are provided for UMP model developers and UMP performance analysts to construct and analyze system models. To demonstrate the usefulness of the framework and guidelines, a prototype information model is developed for a hybrid manufacturing system composed of fused deposition modeling (an additive process) and CNC milling (a subtractive process). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]