Supporting Manufacturing Technology Definition Through Multi-level Resource Consumption Analysis

The lowering of the consumption of resources in the production is an essential contribution to sustainable manufacturing. Critical resources regarding the availability and regeneration such as valuable and rare materials as well as energy are to be spared if possible by a corresponding determination of the manufacturing technologies. From the possible alternative manufacturing variants, it is necessary to select those with the lowest consumption of resources. The decision-making requires an estimation of the consumption of resources which includes the direct consumptions of the machines just as the consumptions initiated by applying the processes. In this paper a concept is presented that allows for estimation of the consumption of material and energy in manufacturing processes. The estimation includes systematically initiated consumptions that will be analyzed the same way as the manufactured products. This way, it is achieved that effects of the technology application on the consumptions of resources become transparent over several stages.