Quantitative Support for System-Level Sustainability and Resilience in Manufacturing Through Bio-Inspired Engineering Design

Manufacturing is a key driver of both economic health and environmental burdens, employing over 12.7 million workers in the U.S. and accounting for 30% of greenhouse gas emissions. Manufacturing systems thus must be both sustainable and resilient, remaining environmentally responsible while maintaining operational stability in the face of increasing numbers of disruptions. Achieving both these in manufacturing is non-trivial and quantitatively ambiguous. This work investigates a bio-inspired approach to quantitatively design for sustainability and resilience. Bio-inspiration in manufacturing system evaluation and design has been explored in prior work, which found preliminary evidence that the approach helps achieve a balance between redundancy and sustainability. This work further validates those findings with a disturbance analysis and clearly connecting the bio-inspiration to traditional manufacturing metrics. Twenty manufacturing floor plan architectures are evaluated using a bio-inspired system design approach and traditional manufacturing metrics. Traditional metrics such as capital cost, throughput, and capacity utilization correlate ecological characteristics with manufacturing-specific goals. The architectures, in both their traditional and bio-inspired architectures, are tested under disturbance scenarios to determine if the bio-inspired designs offer superior performance from a manufacturing perspective. The results identify key relationships between bio-inspired metrics that support both circular economy principles and resilience through efficient pathways and manufacturing convertibility, respectively. The results also form the beginnings of an assessment framework for the use of low-data metrics in the early-stages of manufacturing systems design.