Abstract
In spite of long-standing effort in manufacturing system developments, a lot of resource waste can be found from a viewpoint of environmental efficiency. For sustainable manufacturing, it is important to visualize resource flow in manufacturing processes, and to identify and evaluate hidden waste, or environmental impacts. Then practical Kaizen methods, such as localization and minimization, can be applied to reconfigure existing systems. A generic modelling framework of resource flow in manufacturing processes and an evaluation procedure for environmental efficiency are proposed. Recycling and reuse processes are considered. Some industrial case studies are shown to validate the proposed method.
