Current life cycle assessment tools are often deficient in assisting design for sustainable manufacturing efforts. Integrating an improved assessment method into a decision support framework will provide a means for designers and engineers to better understand the impacts of their decisions. A unit process modeling-based sustainability assessment method is presented to assist design decision making by accounting for and quantifying economic, environmental, and social attributes. A set of these sustainability metrics is defined as a basis for comparison of component design alternatives. The method is demonstrated using two titanium component production alternatives that represent typical design for manufacturing scenarios. The modeling method significantly increases the resolution of sustainable manufacturing metrics over conventional assessment techniques, and is one aspect of the overall decision support framework developed. Additionally, fixed sum importance weighting, weighted sum modeling, and scenario analysis were selected as easily employed and transparent design decision techniques to provide the remaining elements of the framework. The demonstration of the decision support framework for titanium component manufacturing illustrates that the sequential approach developed can assist engineers in developing more sustainable components and products. / Graduation date: 2012

Sustainability has been the focus of intense discussions over the past two decades, with topics around the entire product life cycle. In the manufacturing phase, research has been focused solely on environmental impact assessment or environmental impact and cost analysis in its assessment of sustainability. However, few efforts have investigated sustainable production decision making, where engineers are required to concurrently consider economic, environmental, and social impacts. An approach is developed to assess broader sustainability impacts by conducting economic assessment, environmental impact assessment, and social impact assessment at the work cell level. The results from the assessments are then integrated into a sustainable manufacturing assessment framework, along with a modified weighting method based on pairwise comparison and an outranking decision making method. The approach is illustrated for a representative machining work cell producing stainless steel knives. Economic, environmental, and social impact results are compared for three production scenarios by applying the sustainable manufacturing assessment framework. Sensitivity analysis is conducted to study the robustness of the results. For future research, it is desired that a tool which integrates manufacturing information system information and the sustainable manufacturing assessment approach can be built to assist production engineers in considering sustainability performance when making decisions. / Graduation date: 2012