A SYSTEMS THINKING APPROACH FOR MODELING SUSTAINABLE MANUFACTURING PROBLEMS IN ENTERPRISES

摘要

Increased environmental and social burdens and related demands from customers and broader society have prompted manufacturing enterprises to adopt sustainability principles. Current practices are often focused on environmental impacts alone or combined with economic factors within a limited scope and, thus, tend to overlook potential cause and effect relationships. A systemic approach is desired to address the potential consequences of ad hoc engineering decisions. In this research, systems thinking is adopted to examine this problem by considering three levels of a manufacturing system - operation, shop floor, and enterprise. A conceptual, complementarist systems thinking model embracing sustainability assessment methods is presented. The conceptual model is embedded in a system dynamics model, with substructures presented at the operation level and the shop floor level. This work stands to benefit the engineering management community, and in particular sustainable manufacturing, by sharing a novel approach using systems thinking principles to enhance sustainable manufacturing research and manufacturing system sustainability management.