Supervised Life-Cycle Assessment Using Automated Process Inventory Based on Process Recipes

摘要

Effective integration of environmental issues and process decisions is crucial for an enhanced enterprise operation from an environmental perspective. In this sense, environmental assessment involves the transaction of a large amount of data and information. Hence, tools for improving information sharing and communication have proved to be highly promising to support the integration of environmental assessment within industrial decision making. This work aims to automate the creation of the life cycle inventory (LCI) of production processes and products based on their recipe information. A framework based on a knowledge model of the process and environmental domains relying on the ISA-S88 standard for recipe representation has been developed. As a result, the environmental assessment can be directly derived, and so the environmental indicators are available to the decision maker, thus reducing the data collection and processing efforts. The framework is applied to a case study, namely, an acrylic fiber production process, which comprises 14 production steps and over 11 different production resources. The framework stands for an enterprise decision-making support tool, which recognizes the different environmental elements associated with production recipes, facilitating environmental assessment of production processes.