Strategic and Tactical Control for Sustainable Manufacturing

Sustainable manufacturing has been widely recognized as “the creation of manufactured products through economically-sound processes that minimize negative environmental impacts while conserving energy and natural resources”; it “also enhances employee, community, and product safety” [1]. This definition contains two important aspects: (i) triple-bottom-line based manufacturing, and (ii) continuous rather than one-time adjustment. The former reflects the nature of sustainability, a multi-objective optimization problem, while the latter is a dynamic control problem. In short, sustainable manufacturing is a multi-objective optimal control problem.

In this paper, we introduce a sustainability-oriented hierarchical control methodology for achieving short-to-long-term sustainability goals in large-scale manufacturing. This methodology, by resorting to sustainability fundamentals, system control science, and engineering science, aims at implementing tactical control of individual manufacturing processes, where energy and material efficiencies, waste reduction, product quality, process safety, etc., are all targeted, and realizing strategic control of the manufacturing enterprise to achieve a short-to-long-term sustainability goals, where external information about economic, environmental, and social-related changes will be incorporated. These two layers of control will be coordinated algorithmically. A comprehensive case study on nanocoating manufacturing is illustrated to demonstrate methodological efficacy.

Reference:

[1] EPA: https://archive.epa.gov/sustainablemanufacturing/web/html/