Research On Decision Making Approach For Implementation Of Green Manufacturing

Globally, green manufacturing has gained very much attention due to growing concerns on energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions. Effective costing and sustainable supplier selection are very critical to ensuring the profitability of a company and success of green manufacturing. During implementing sustainable supplier selection as pre- requisite of green manufacturing, engineering managers are required to insure that suppliers maintain their status for a long period. Also, the cost effectiveness of implementation of green manufacturing has to be ascertained by engineering managers; the reality is that green manufacturing will peak with cost justifications. These necessitate efficient dynamic modeling technique.Most researches related to the topic of green manufacturing decision making process in the literature are based on static mathematical modeling techniques. The static mathematical modeling techniques in operations research might not be deemed reliable given their inability to integrate all the variables of a real situation into the decision support models.Systems dynamics has a distinct advantage in analyzing and managing the system characterized by extended development cycle and extreme feedback effects. It is regarded as an efficient on-time modeling technique. Thus, this dissertation proposes incorporating systems dynamics modeling approach in green manufacturing environment to provide holistic decision evaluation and support for supplier and cost decisions. The attention of the dissertation focus on the advantages of systems dynamics model as a valuable provider of information for green manufacturing supplier management decision making process and in modeling the related carbon- cost management system. This dissertation intends to integrate this powerful dynamic modeling technique into a supplier selection problem and cost management problem as typical green manufacturing problems.Firstly, a system dynamics model is presented for analyzing inter- dependences of sustainability factors in a manufacturing firm and deducts sustainability factors. Then, the deducted sustainability factors were applied to an integrated fuzzy- logic and systems dynamics model developed for sustainable supplier selection. Lastly, the cost constraints of the selected sustainable supplier were applied to an integrated improved process- based cost model and systems dynamics model to ascertain the cost of implementing green manufacturing.This dissertation elucidates the benefits of incorporating systems dynamics modeling technique in green manufacturing supplier selection and cost decision support tools. The main focus of the research is on green manufacturing supplier and cost management. The decision methodology provides cost justifications of green manufacturing based on sustainable supplier selection and reduced carbon emission factor. It is also able to provide a detailed life cycle assessment of manufactured product simultaneously.In general, the novel modeling approach developed in this thesis effectively analyses the relevant sustainability factors in a manufacturing firm, applies the sustainability factors to provide an on- time supplier monitoring technique and incorporates a life cycle assessment measurement into manufacturing cost management. Such an approach can assists engineering managers to analyze the behavior of sustainable suppliers and predict cost of implementing green manufacturing.