Achieving sustainability in manufacturing systems: A quantitative study

This paper presents a multi-objective optimisation (MOO) mathematical model that can be employed as an aid for manufacturing systems design and evaluation aiming to minimize energy consumption, amount of carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions and the total cost at an early stage. This approach associated with the number of machines, number of air-conditioning units and number of light bulbs involved in each process in conjunction with a quantity of material flow for processing the products in a manufacturing system. A real case study was examined for validating the applicability of the proposed approach. The research outcome demonstrates that this MOO model can be an effective decision-making approach for seeking a trade-off decision a mong multiple of decision-making objectives such as energy consumption, amount of CO2 emissions and total cost towards a sustainable manufacturing system (SMS) design at an early stage before actual construction or use of the system.