Sustainability Benefits Analysis of Cyber-Manufacturing Systems

Abstract Cyber-Manufacturing System (CMS) is a vision for the factory of the future, where manufacturing processes and physical components are seamlessly integrated with computational processes to provide agile, adaptive, and scalable manufacturing services. Functional elements of CMS are digitized, registered, and shared with users and stakeholders through various computer networks and the Internet. CMS incorporates recent advances in the Internet of Things, Cloud Computing, Cyber-Physical System, Service-Oriented Technologies, Modeling and Simulation, Sensor Networks, Machine Learning, Data Analytics, and Advanced Manufacturing Processes. CMS possesses intelligence such as self-monitoring, self-adjustment, self-prediction, self-allocation, self-configuration, self-scalability, self-remediating, and self-reusing. Such intelligent capabilities enable CMS to contribute to manufacturing sustainability. However, prior studies are limited in addressing a narrow scope of CMS or in covering only a subset of sustainability dimensions. This paper addresses the research gap by developing a holistic CMS infrastructure and adopting a Distance-to-Target based sustainability assessment approach to measure the sustainability benefits of CMS. To illustrate how the infrastructure and metrics are used to analyze the sustainability benefits of CMS, an example case is presented. The results show that CMS can deliver substantial sustainability benefits through increased productivity, profitability & energy efficiencies, and reduction of working-in-process (WIP) inventory levels & logistics costs.