Interoperability for Simulation of Sustainable Manufacturing

Paper in proceeding, 2010

Sustainability has become a very significant research topic, it impacts many different manufacturing industries. To achieve sustainable manufacturing, designing manufacturing systems that have less negative impact on the environment is critical. Modeling and Simulation (M&S) is an essential ingredient for success of sustainable manufacturing through its ability to predict the effect of implementing certain facility, process, and product actions. M&S for sustainable manufacturing requires the exchange of information with a variety of manufacturing systems, applications, and databases. M&S also provides appropriate models and methods to tailor algorithms for performing accurate transformations of the data. This paper introduces a methodology to support interoperability among simulation tools and other manufacturing systems that support sustainability. The methodology describes how to collect and process the identified data in order to make it reusable for M&S stud-ies to achieve sustainable manufacturing. Three potential case studies are identified and discussed as a scope for future work.