A Methodology for Holistic Lifecycle Approach as Decision Support System for Closed-loop Lifecycle Management

Sustainability of their products and practices provides companies with a competitive set of methods and tools to maintain, improve and expand customer and supplier relationships and to ensure access to strategic markets. Companies pay a lot of attention to produce more sustainable products and contribute to the overall sustainability. Most of the companies manage to use lighter materials or change the material with a recyclable one or try to decrease the energy used for manufacturing. However most of these attempts are related to only one part of the life cycle or one aspect of sustainability. In spite the fact that sustainability is thought to be related with the environmental aspects of the product, it is a broad concept and has economic and social dimensions. This makes the evaluation of sustainability a very complex matter. On top of that, to achieve a certain level of sustainability, it is necessary to take into account the whole life cycle of products (life cycle perspective) from material extraction and manufacturing to use and disposal when a decision has to be made about sustainability performance. In order to evaluate the sustainability performance of the products it is necessary to combine a number of life cycle evaluation methodologies; life cycle assessment (LCA) for environmental aspects, life cycle costing (LCC) for economic aspects, and social life cycle assessment for (S-LCA) for social aspects. Product lifecycle management system help to manage product related information through its life cycle. However, generally the capabilities of PLM systems are limited to the operations of one company or in some cases it might have been extended to their 1st degree partners. Additionally, the information flow of the product is often restricted to the beginning of life (BOL) phase. Closed-Loop Lifecycle Management is a more recent concept which goes beyond the limits of traditional PLM systems and is targeting seamless information flow across all phases of the life cycle. Closed-loop PLM systems use product embedded identification devices (PEIDs) and enables to gather and distribute life cycle information through the life cycle of a product more precisely. This information may further be used for evaluation of the products sustainability performance. The methods and tools for sustainability assessment are constrained with the availability of data. Closed-loop PLM systems are capable of gathering life cycle data and processing it in order to make informed decisions towards sustainability. A Closed-Loop Lifecycle Management system containing a DSS configured with the holistic life cycle approach will be an efficient tool to evaluate and improve the sustainability performance of products. The proposed methodology in this dissertations benefits from the comprehensiveness of the life cycle thinking and integrates the tools for evaluation of all aspects of sustainability. It has been applied to three test cases and validated. Finally, the results of this work have been published in conferences and journal papers.

Urban renewal and sustainability

Maria Gracia Riera Perez

Many studies have shown that urban sprawl, which typifies most European cities, leads to: waste of land, increased energy demand, environmental impacts and high infrastructure costs. It is therefore necessary to renew the existing urban fabric to provide a good quality environment for a growing population, enable efficient management of economic resources, energy and environment. The aim of the project is to develop a decision support tool at the neighborhood scale, integrating sustainability into the dynamics of urban renewal projects through a multi-criteria assessment method including socio-cultural, economic and environmental aspects. This research project aims to promote a transparent, conscious and responsible decision-making, but also to contribute to the creative process of the future vision through a reliable and structured source of information on the neighborhood and its context.

2012

A Study on Social Assessment in Holistic Lifecycle Management

Fatih Karakoyun

Sustainable manufacturing has been focus of the industry for some time. Due to the holistic nature of sustainability not only the manufacturing processes but the whole life cycle and the environmental, economic and social aspects of the product should be taken in to account. In order to leverage from the concept of sustainability it is necessary to involve it in decision making process in the supply chain. It is essential to have an evaluation procedure so as to involve it in decision making which should be capable of assessing economic, environmental and social performance of the product. Unfortunately the social dimension of sustainability is the least developed and even neglected because it is difficult to evaluate due to its quantitative and subjective nature. The social aspects of holistic life cycle approach will be presented in this paper.

Springer-Verlag Berlin2015

Assessing the environmental and economic potential of Limestone Calcined Clay Cement in Cuba

Aurélie Rosine Favier, Karen Scrivener

Cement is the most produced material around the world. Developing countries face a growth of population involving an increasing need of infrastructures. Due to this situation, the cement industry needs to find the best comprise between increasing the cement production and without increasing the negative environmental impact. A promising solution has been found in the use of supplementary cementitious materials (SCM), these materials are used to replace clinker in cement because of their pozzolanic reactivity. In this paper, a method was developed to assess the details of the economic and environmental potential of the specific Limestone Calcined Clays Cement LC3 technology in the Cuban context. A comparison with traditional Portland cement and the current commercial blended cement with zeolite (PPC) sold in Cuba was made. The results provide evidenced based data for the development of a strategy to adopt the LC3 technology by the Cuban market This assessment method can then be easily extended to markets in other developing countries. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Elsevier Sci Ltd2016