Assessing sustainability benefits of cybermanufacturing systems

Confronted with growing sustainability awareness, mounting environmental pressure, manufacturers are seriously striving to address sustainability-related issues without sacrificing customers’ needs and market competitiveness. A new manufacturing system called cybermanufacturing system (CMS) has great potential in addressing sustainability issues by handling manufacturing tasks differently from and better than traditional manufacturing systems. CMS is a vision for future manufacturing where physical components are fully integrated and seamlessly networked with computational processes, forming an on-demand, intelligent, and communicative manufacturing resource and capability repository with optimal, sustainability-oriented manufacturing solutions. The recent developments in the Internet of things, cloud computing, fog computing, service-oriented technologies, etc., all contributed to the development of CMS. In this new manufacturing paradigm, every manufacturing resource or capability is digitalized, registered, and networked to each other directly or through the Internet, thus enabling intelligent behaviors of manufacturing components and systems such as self-awareness, self-prediction, self-optimization, and self-configuration, among others. In this research, a comprehensive definition of CMS has been developed, a suggested architecture of CMS has been constructed, and important functions of CMS have been identified. Simulation models have been developed and used to investigate the sustainability benefits of CMS. The simulation results show promising sustainability benefits of CMS over traditional manufacturing systems.