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Summary:To support industry’s drive to remain globally competitive and maximize innovation, this program will develop and deploy advances in measurement science to achieve sustainability across manufacturing processes thus enabling manufacturing resource efficiency and production network resiliency . Currently, industry lacks accurate metrics and the needed measurement science to evaluate sustainable performances such as energy and material efficiencies, emissions, waste, and water usage of manufacturing processes. Accordingly, the critical solution-enabling measurement science activities for the program includes the development of methodologies for sustainable processes and resources; and the integration infrastructure for sustainable manufacturing. The methodologies will focus to characterize unit manufacturing and assembly processes, including supplier capabilities, enabling industry level manufacturing assessments to improve production efficiency. The integration infrastructure will enable the systematic and functional integration of unit manufacturing systems and subsystems to perform as a holistic sustainable system for improved production efficiency while being economically competitive. Description:
Objective: To develop and deploy advances in measurement science to achieve sustainability across manufacturing processes enabling resource efficiency and production network resiliency by 2016.
What is the problem? Industrial interest in sustainable manufacturing has increased dramatically in recent years yet the supporting infrastructure and methodologies are lacking. Global competition requires American manufacturers to implement sustainability practices in their manufacturing operations2. A recent Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) report3 stressed the “… need for accessible and affordable measurement systems and analytical tools for assessing and managing sustainability across the production process.” A myriad of sustainability indicators have been proposed to measure the impact of those changes. Three of the most critical indicators are energy efficiency, material efficiency, and resiliency4. A number of metrics and associated computational methods have been suggested for those indicators. However, innovative best practices and the underlying measurement science for assessing the validity of those metrics, evaluating the accuracy of those methods, and documenting the results of the computations do not exist. U.S. industry does not have the necessary measurement science capabilities to assess the sustainability performance of existing manufacturing operations and predict the impact of proposed supplier, plant, process, or product actions. This includes evaluating sustainable performances such as energy and material efficiency, emissions, waste, and water usage of manufacturing processes. These evaluations are further challenged by multiple stakeholder requirements or company sustainability objectives such as marketing and profitability. Implementing new sustainability methodologies frequently demands innovation in manufacturing technologies and associated new measurement capabilities A NIST industry workshop report5 stated that “Industry is unable to measure economic, social, and environmental consequences of their activities and products accurately during the entire life cycle and across their supplier network”. Addressing this challenge will require new, science-based methods for performing these measurements at the supply chain, enterprise, process, and product levels. These methods will facilitate the development of new optimization techniques crucial to improving both the design and manufacturing phases of the product life cycle. Why is it hard to solve? Ensuring sustainable manufacturing requires an integrated systems approach and spans technical, economic, ecological, and societal issues. Interactions within and across these issues are critical to the fundamental understanding of sustainable manufacturing, because focusing on any single issue could result in suboptimal solutions and unintended consequences. Industry recognizes that (1) sustainability challenges in manufacturing can only be addressed through multi-disciplinary methodologies and (2) implementing these methodologies can have significant economic benefits for sustainability in general and sustainable manufacturing in particular6. Although a number of such methodologies exist, the measurement science necessary to determine their accuracy does not exist. Also, the necessary standards to represent and report the information used and processed by these methodologies are yet to be developed. Additionally, since these methodologies can be expensive to implement, many companies – particularly small- and medium-sized companies – do not use them. Consequently, most companies have no way to track and aggregate sustainability-related data of individual processes, factories, and supplier networks. How is it solved today, and by whom? Within the U.S, an increasing number of companies are realizing the importance of implementing sustainability practices in their manufacturing operations7. However, typical implementation strategies define stand-alone, narrowly scoped projects. These projects are prioritized and generally planned on a case-by-case basis. They usually perform an assessment of a selected sustainability metric and recommend changes to improve that metric. There is, however, no systematic, generalized approach to doing the assessment based on measurement science. Furthermore, changes are implemented with limited understanding of their broader sustainability impacts8. This typically results in local optimization that can miss opportunities and potentially cause larger, untended, negative consequences. International research efforts in the European Union, Japan, and Korea are promoting energy and material efficiency through a list of directives that require the elimination of toxic materials, a reduction in waste going to landfills, and improvements in energy usage. They are also making huge investments for research and technological development9 in sustainability-related research, innovation, and education. Finally, they have incorporated mandatory performance targets and provide financial incentives to help companies meet those targets. Why NIST? This program is aligned with the Engineering Laboratory (EL) mission to promote U.S. innovation and industrial competitiveness in areas of critical national priority. It is also aligned with the “Sustainable and Energy-Efficient Manufacturing, Materials, and Infrastructure” strategic goal. The program researchers have developed extensive measurement science expertise in life cycle assessment, product and process information modeling, interoperability of engineering applications, best practice guidelines, and standards-related research. All are necessary to implement the technical idea and research plan described below. Recent studies conducted by Harvard Business School10 and the MIT Sloan School of Management11,12, concluded that sustainable product and process development across all industry sectors “is essential to remaining competitive.” Further industrial organizations that predict and plan for a sustainable future are more likely to survive into the next generation13. The US Congress, in passing The America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 201014, mandated NIST to “develop accurate sustainability metrics and practices”, “to advance the development of standards”, and “create an information infrastructure to communicate sustainability information about suppliers.” What is the new technical idea? The new technical idea involves (1) innovative measurement science for characterizing manufacturing processes with respect to sustainability and (2) assessment methods that use those characterizations to evaluate and optimize selected energy, material, and resiliency15 metrics. The program focuses on process characterization at three levels: unit, factory, and network. It will develop an engineering information system architecture that enables aggregation of metrics across all levels. This architecture will easily integrate optimization algorithms with those characterizations and assessments – this will serves as an enabler for improved decision support. It will also allow industries to run analytical computations and simulations that result in reliable and traceable measurements. Why can we succeed now? There is a heightened awareness of the economic and competitive importance of sustainable manufacturing technologies by U.S. manufacturing. In response there is an emerging body of research results that will support incorporating sustainability considerations (including an increasing number of indicators, and their associated weighting and uncertainty factors) in manufacturing processes. There has also been an increased effort by the manufacturing sector to collect sustainable manufacturing information using energy management systems, data collection systems, material declaration systems, and best practices. This, coupled with advances in engineering information systems, information modeling, integration technologies, and decision support methodologies, provides the critical foundation for success in characterizing manufacturing processes and aid performance assessment and decision making at all levels. EL staff has the necessary mission and expertise to further the advances and trends listed above and leveraging relationships with key industry stakeholders and standards development organizations. What is the research plan? The research plan is defined to implement the technical ideas described above. It is organized into two main thrusts and six research projects. The Methodologies for Sustainable Processes and Resources Thrust focuses on sustainability characterization, assessment and aggregation of unit and assembly processes, factories, and supply networks. This thrust will provide the mathematical foundations needed to develop process models that focus on sustainability. It will define a variety of metrics associated with energy, materials, and resiliency; and, it will develop computational methods for computing those metrics using the process models. Finally, it will produce new techniques for aggregating these metrics across all of the process levels. The effort will enable industry level manufacturing assessments to improve sustainability performance by characterizing unit manufacturing and assembly processes, including supplier capabilities.
How will teamwork be ensured?
N1. Key terminology, definitions, technical specifications, and representations for describing sustainable manufacturing resources and processes and their performance, needed by FY13. N2. Infrastructure and standardized methods to assess the sustainability of manufacturing processes and manufactured products, needed by FY15. N3. A standards testing framework and benchmarking strategy that will help industry to measure, manage, validate, and report product impact for sustainability, needed by FY15.
N4. Standard methods and supporting tools that enable manufacturers to characterize their manufacturing unit processes and contribute these models to an open library of standard manufacturing unit processes, needed by FY14. N5. Standardized data aggregation methods that will work with manufacturing process characterization (using manufacturing and assembly unit processes) from part level to the product assembly level with defined measurement uncertainty quantification, needed by FY15. N6. Standard methods that enable the computation and comparison of energy and material efficiency metrics within a manufacturer and across the supply chain, needed by FY15. N7. A standardized approach to rapidly configure production unit process models that will enable sustainability assessment including critical aspects of life cycle analysis/inventory (LCA/I), needed by FY16.
Major Accomplishments:Integration Infrastructure for Sustainable Manufacturing Thrust:
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Start Date:October 1, 2011Lead Organizational Unit:elCustomers/Contributors/Collaborators:
Staff:Rachuri Sudarsan, Program Manager NIST PortalsSustainable ManufacturingLean Manufacturing Green Manufacturing
Related Programs and Projects:Contact
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