Manufacturers are increasingly faced with the need to develop resilient production systems capable of mitigating the impacts of disruptive events while simultaneously achieving sustainability-related targets. While resilient and sustainable design of manufacturing systems has been extensively studied in prior work, limited attention has been given towards understanding the sustainability-related impacts due to production disruptions. Furthermore, increasing the resilience of a manufacturing system, e.g., to mitigate performance losses due to disruptions, could lead to reduced sustainability-related performance. This paper investigates the link between resilient and sustainable manufacturing and seeks to answer whether these two goals can be simultaneously accomplished, in the context of electronics manufacturing using surface mount technology (SMT). To this end, a dynamic carbon emissions model based on discrete event simulation (DES) was developed for a hypothetical-realistic SMT assembly line located in Denmark. This SMT production facility was made of two production lines using different layouts. SMT line 1 had a linear inline layout, while SMT line 2 had a modular floor layout. The resilience and sustainability-related performance of the electronics assembly line was investigated under a production disruption scenario, specifically a simulated machine breakdown and repair at different levels of severity. Resilience performance was assessed by the frequency of disruptions occurring and the number of disruptions which occurred, and sustainability performance was assessed using the carbon equivalent emissions produced during production from the energy required to run the machinery. Results from this study indicate that an increase in resilience of a manufacturing facility has a positive correlation to the carbon footprint of the products produced. Additionally, this study indicates that modular manufacturing floor layouts have an ability to decrease the impact of disruptions on the carbon footprint of products.
Bushagour et al. (Thu,) studied this question.