Sustainability Assessment in Manufacturing and Target Setting in Highly Automated Production

The interest in sustainability in manufacturing is growing. The European Commission elaborated in collaboration with the European Factories of the Future Research Association (EFFRA) a road map until 2030. The revised ISO 14001 standard, released end of 2015, emphasizes the integration of a life cycle perspective in production. External stakeholders like the Carbon Disclosure Project are striving for very detailed sustainability-related information. Therefore, this chapter will describe the latest approaches of how to assess sustainability in manufacturing, how production planning works in automated production and how sustainability thinking might be integrated in a feasible way. Additionally, a new framework is described which is able to link and allocate the product-related life cycle emissions in a consistent way from the large context down to the individual machine tool level in manufacturing. In essence, this chapter points out that efforts in manufacturing improvements need to be done with a view on entire systems rather than with a view only on single “island solutions”—and it shows a way how to do this.