A method for evaluating environmental performance of machining systems

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae, and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand, or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material. Effective evaluating environmental performance of a machining system is critical for continuous environmental improvement and a long-term survival of intense competition. Manufacturers face difficulties during the environmental performance evaluating process due to vague and subjective considerations. To help enterprises economically and effectively improve environmental performance, a new method for evaluating environmental performance of a machining system is presented. In this method, a multi-criteria decision-making technique (analytical hierarchy process) is employed to set baselines for environmental performance evaluation, and a back-propagation neural network is used to express the preferences and knowledge of the decision makers about the evaluating problems. An illustrative example is used to illustrate how the assessment method may be applied and to demonstrate its applicability. 1. Introduction The interest in achieving green manufacturing progress on the path to more sustainable production is growing. This is driven by steadily increasing costs of energy and resources, government regulations, and interest in reducing the environmental impacts of production (Chun et al. 2010). As a major manufacturing process, the machining system plays an important role for green manufacturing on the factory floor (Shao et al. 2010). A machining system, mainly comprised of machine tools and auxiliary setups, is an input and output system that machines raw materials or semifinal products into final products or semifinal products for the next phase production by changing the shape or traits (Wang et al. 2011). During the transformation process, two side effects are concomitant. One is the resource consumption problem, and the other is the environmental emission problem (Melngk and Smith 1996). More and more manufacturers are being asked to characterise and reduce their environmental influence, since resources consumption and environmental emissions have been considered as major factors in machining systems (Yi et al. …