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Increasing numbers of companies in the manufacturing industry have identified market potential for implementing sustainable and green manufacturing. Yet, current sustainability assessment tools for companies are complicated, requiring vast amounts of data and technical expertise to use them. Value Stream Mapping (VSM) is founded on lean practices, and it uses a simple method to analyze various types of material, energy, and information flow needed to bring products and services to the end-customer. The objective of this paper is to introduce and illustrate the application of a VSM-based assessment, termed as Sustainable Manufacturing Mapping (SMM). SMM takes chosen sustainability indicators into consideration and is based on VSM, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), and Discrete Event Simulation (DES). The main phases of SMM include goal definition, identification of the sustainability indicators, and modeling the current and future state process maps. In this paper, some example indicators were identified and an SMM process map was generated for illustrative purposes. 1 3411 978-1-4244-9864-2/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE

Manufacturing simulation and digital engineering tools and procedures have had a positive impact on the manufacturing industry. However, to design a sustainable manufacturing system, a multitude of system dimensions must be jointly optimized. This paper proposes an integrated simulation tool helping to maximize production efficiency and balance environmental constraints already in the system design phase. Lean manufacturing, identification and elimination of waste and production losses, and environmental considerations are all needed during development of a sustainable manufacturing system. Engineers designing the manufacturing system need decision support, otherwise sub-optimization is more likely to occur. We present methods for calculating energy efficiency, CO2 emissions and other environmental impacts integrated into factory simulation software.1922 978-1-4244-2708-6/08/$25.00

Market turbulence forces assembly plants to constantly adjust their production volume of products, variants and quantities. At the same time, assembly plant managers must protect long‐term investments in the flexible assembly system. For reconfigurability and agility the best solution is the modular semi‐automatic approach by combining flexible automation and human skills. It gives managers possibility to adjust volume by adding new modules or to automate the manual tasks step by step. The control of material handling and information flow in the agile assembly system is important. To keep flexibility, the combination of an intelligent pallet, i.e. use of escort memory, carrying a single product together with other hardware providing paperless production even supports a lot size of one. The article shows how to create flexible capability and capacity in the final assembly systems.

Discrete-event simulation (DES) has mainly been used as a production system analysis tool to evaluate new production system concepts, layout and control logic. Recent developments have made DES models feasible for use in the day-to-day operational production and planning of manufacturing facilities. Operative simulation models provide manufacturers with the ability to evaluate the capacity of the system for new orders, unforeseen events such as equipment downtime, and changes in operations. A simulationbased Decision Support System (DSS) can be used to help planners and schedulers organize production more efficiently in the turbulent global manufacturing. This paper presents the challenges for development and the efforts to overcome these challenges for the simulation-based DSS. The major challenges are: 1) data integration 2) automated simulation model creation and updates and 3) the visualization of results for interactive and effective decision making. A recent case study is also presented.