Defining Sustainable Manufacturing Using a Concept of Attractor as a Metaphor

Sustainability assessment (SA) is a decision support tool that should guide decision makers toward sustainability. A lack of the operational definition of sustainable manufacturing (SM) is one of the challenges that researchers face when developing SA tools for manufacturing. Existing definitions do not provide an explicit list of criteria for SM that affects the choice of indicators for assessment, and thus the reliability and accuracy of the assessment result. The observed lack of common sustainability criteria that can be used when one develops a SA tool for manufacturing organization is the main motivation for this research. In this paper, one of the ideas of complexity theoryattractorhas been used as a metaphor to define SM with the comprehensive list of criteria for SM.