Design and implementation of a PLM system for sustainable manufacturing

Abstract

Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, manufacturing industries have primarily been responsible for adverse effects on the environment caused by pollutants such as carbon dioxide. Therefore, there has been tremendous pressure for these industries to be globally competitive within the range of environmental regulations and laws, which has been greatly increased and reinforced these days. In addition, manufacturing industries have been confronted with new challenges owing to the depletion of energy and natural resources, economic stagnation, and increasing human needs that become very diverse. Thus, low-carbon green growth, cleaner production, and eco-friendly products are main issues, and sustainable manufacturing is the driving direction in the future manufacturing industry. PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) is one of the innovative manufacturing paradigms that leverage e-business technologies in order to allow a company's product content to be developed and integrated with all company business processes through an extended enterprise. In this paper, we designed a new information model and a PLM system for sustainable manufacturing using UML methodology. We performed thoughtful analyses of existing PLM and sustainable indicator, basic schema and information model for supporting sustainable manufacturing engineering are developed. This paper also presents apractical case study showing information model and sustainable engineering by using commercial PDM software. © 2012 International Federation for Information Processing.