Towards Quantitative Factory Life Cycle Evaluation

Research output: Journal contributionsJournal articlesResearchpeer-review

Authors

  • Lars Nielsen
  • Christopher Schmidt
  • Stefan Blume
  • Matthias Schmidt
  • Sebastian Thiede
  • Peter Nyhuis
  • Christoph Herrmann

Manufacturing companies face the challenge of understanding and improving complex factory systems in order to stay competitive in a turbulent environment. Interrelated and overlapping life cycles of products and physical factory elements (e.g. machine tools, technical building services, building shell) are challenges to be handled in factory planning and operation. This work discusses both qualitative and quantitative factory life cycle models, analyzing addressed sustainability goals. Due to the lack of quantitative life cycle description models on higher system levels, a concept for aggregating life cycle models from shop floor up to site level is developed. The concept is consequently applied in a case study where cost curves are calculated over the factory's life span and are aggregated to support factory planning and operation.

Original languageEnglish
JournalProcedia CIRP
Volume55
Pages (from-to)266-271
Number of pages6
ISSN2212-8271
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 12.2016
Externally publishedYes

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
A production site can consist of different locally interdependent factories. Research in the area of life cycle evaluation on site level was funded by the European Commission in the Pathfinder project. In the course of this research project, models describing the life cycles of single factories and interactions with their environment and infrastructure were developed. The considered goals of these models involve the economic, ecological and social dimension. Results of this project are a “Pathfinder Vision and Roadmap”, which contains the qualitative description of potentials that could arise from a comprehensive factory life cycle evaluation [13].

Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license.

    Research areas

  • Factory Life Cycle, Factory Planning, Life Cycle Evaluation, Life Cycle Prediction
  • Engineering