ASTM E60.13 Standards

NIST’s Engineering Lab works closely with ASTM Subcommittee E60.13 on Sustainable Manufacturing, where we serve in leadership positions. Our contributions to ASTM’s sustainable manufacturing work fall into three focus areas:

1. Process improvements
   • E60.13 has a long history of creating standards that help manufacturers assess and improve on manufacturing processes that support sustainability goals.
2. Investments
   • This work gives manufacturers tools they need when considering investments into environmentally sustainable manufacturing.
3. Circular product design
   • The design stage is critical for determining the circularity and sustainability of products. NIST is leading the development of a standard outlining the principles for designing products in a circular economy.

Process Improvements

• Overview
• Research Overview of Standards for Unit Manufacturing Process (UMP) modeling
• Benefits and Use Cases
• References

Overview

The Systems Integration Division (SID) works closely with ASTM Subcommittee E60.13 on Sustainable Manufacturing, where we serve in leadership positions. E60.13 addresses a key problem that manufacturers struggle with: assessing and improving their processes and understanding the implications of changes in the operation of those processes. Other methods and tools to assess and describe sustainability of manufactured products focus on the life cycle of the products and do not necessarily account for individual manufacturing processes explicitly. For a given manufacturer, however, understanding their processes is critical to improving their performance and to including sustainability goals in their decision making. Manufacturing processes consume a large percentage of our national resources, so optimizing the performance of those processes holds tremendous potential for improving them while reducing their overall environmental impacts [1]. 

ASTM International’s E60.13 Subcommittee on Sustainable Manufacturing provides methods and guidance to help manufacturers address these needs. With NIST contributions, the initial set of standards addresses a range of approaches for integrating sustainability into manufacturing operations. 

• E2979 Standard Classification for Discarded Materials from Manufacturing Facilities and Associated Support Facilities
• E2986: Standard Guide for Evaluation of Environmental Aspects of Sustainability of Manufacturing Processes     
  • Provides guidance for manufacturers on how to conduct a sustainability study to improve their practices
• E2987/E2987M: Standard Terminology for Sustainable Manufacturing     
  • Includes terminology applicable to sustainable manufacturing
• E3012: Standard Guide for Characterizing Environmental Aspects of Manufacturing Processes     
  • Provides guidance for the actual characterization of manufacturing processes
• E3096 Standard Guide for Definition, Selection, and Organization of Key Performance Indicators for Environmental Aspects of Manufacturing Processes     

SID made major contributions to the suite of standards for modeling Unit Manufacturing Processes (or UMPs) E2986, E3012, and E3096. These can be used in unison to enable improvements to specific manufacturing processes and are described below.

Research Overview of Standards for Unit Manufacturing Process (UMP) modeling

Manufacturers lack uniform methods to represent manufacturing processes and equipment performance, and our research found that this makes it difficult for industries to consistently compute and compare how sustainable their manufacturing processes are [1,2]. Manufacturers struggle to consistently characterize their systems and collect the data needed to understand trade-offs. Our research also showed that, when manufactures and their academic counterparts analyze manufacturing processes, they often focus on different metrics. This makes their results very difficult to compare and reuse [1]. The standard format defined in ASTM E3012 provides a basis for ensuring that a consistent set of details are covered and that they are covered consistently. This consistency allows for better comparison, more reuse, and, in the end, more reliable results. NIST’s research reviewed the existing approaches to modeling manufacturing processes and selected the best practices and techniques for creating digital representations through a suite of three standards. Through rigorous review by ASTM and demonstrations in the research community, these standards to support emerging needs for digital manufacturing were finalized. 

The ISO 14000 family of standards on environmental management are widely acknowledged to help manufacturers improve their sustainability. While these standards are a useful first step and help in developing a management approach to sustainability, they fall short of providing specific guidance for manufacturers to dive deeply into their processes and find more complex opportunities for improvement. The ASTM standards provide guidance to help manufacturers go through their processes one by one, capture the characteristics of those processes in terms of how they impact the environment, and look for opportunities to be more sustainable in their operations. The characteristics of a process are descriptions of what goes into and out of the process, what the process does in terms of how it transforms its inputs, and what other types of resources it uses. We call these descriptions unit manufacturing process or UMP models.

In addition to a systematic approach for characterizing the processes, the standards define a formal representation for those characterizations. Structure and formalism are needed for computer-interpretation to allow direct use of the representations for effective communication, computational analytics, and exchange of performance information. A formal information model promotes new software tool development that can link manufacturing information and analytics for calculating the desired environmental performance measures. Also, specific software tools will improve decision support capabilities while facilitating the development and extension of standardized data and information bases such as Life Cycle Inventory (LCI). LCI data is used in life cycle assessments (LCA), part of the 14000 family of standards. This is where the two approaches to sustainability assessment—the top down approach coming from the ISO 14000 family and the bottom up measurements coming via the ASTM standards—come together. ASTM E3012-16 is a starting point for computer-interpretation. Work is still needed to realize the vision of computation analytics and tool integration, but we now have a standard place to start. 

Applying the standards to specify a form for digital representations for individual unit manufacturing processes can help businesses transition to using more formal methods for scientific modeling for decision-making and production planning [2].

Benefits and Use Cases

The E3012 standard series was designed to be applicable across industries and manufacturing processes. The evolving standard was applied in a number of different industrial settings including pulp and paper [6], stone product [7], injection modeling [8,11], alloy surface inspection [9], additive manufacturing [10], and die casting [12]. The research highlighted the following objectives of the standard:

• facilitate communication between different stakeholders by providing a uniform and consistent documentation format;
• link a number of unit manufacturing processes together to develop system models that characterize specific production plans for discrete, batch, or continuous production; and
• Provide a basis for generating data sets to represent environmental impacts of the processes, comparable to LCI data sets.

The standard may be of particular interest to the software providers from manufacturing industries that provide analysis and modeling and/or simulation solutions to manufacturers. The standard format promotes information exchange and communication for decision making purposes. 

The standard will show even more benefit over time as UMP models are collected. We envision different organizations building up their own repositories of UMP models unique to their systems. Such a repository would potentially reduce modeling time and improve model verification and validation activities. Industries may also come up with a set of standard models of common processes. Textbooks that are available today describe different types of processes. With the standard the information found in textbooks could be represented more formally as UMP models. 

Application of the standard may result in reduced operational costs, improved prediction of product costs, improved scheduling maximizing manufacturing resources, improved control of product quality, and better transfer of best practices. Examples showing these benefits are described in the open literature [6] [13]. The standard provides a uniform and repeatable way for more practitioners to reap these benefits.

E3012

The E3012 standards outline a process characterization methodology and proposes a generic representation from which manufacturers can derive specific UMP representations for meaningful sustainability performance analysis. According to the guide, environmental characterization identifies

• UMPs, their associative key performance indicators (KPIs), and the boundaries that define the UMP. KPIs are quantifiable and strategic measurements that reflect an organization’s critical success factors in terms of understanding and improving manufacturing performance.
• UMP specific attributes, specifically the inputs, manufacturing resources, product and process information, and outputs for chosen UMPs, and
• transformation functions and key UMP specific variables required for calculating transformation equations.

The UMP is represented graphically as is shown here. Transformation functions are used to describe the transformation of inputs to outputs. These transformations are enabled through the use of information contained in other elements identified as Resources and Product and Process Information in the graphical model. Transformations include changes in

• material (e.g., mass change, phase change, structure change, deformation, and consolidation),
• energy (e.g., chemical, electrical, thermal, mechanical, and electromagnetic),
• information, such as production metrics (e.g., throughput and overall equipment effectiveness) or environmental metrics (e.g., energy, material, water, emissions, and waste).

Transformations create data to establish baseline measurements for these metrics (e.g. energy in kWh). The generic representation is used as a template for collecting key information about a specific UMP. The instantiated UMP model is structured using a formal representation such as an XML format that enables machine interpretation.

E3096

The E3096 standards address the need for an open and neutral procedure in selecting key performance indicators (KPIs) for sustainable manufacturing when individual manufacturers are selecting KPIs for measuring, monitoring and improving environmental aspects of manufacturing processes. This standard guide can be used for (1) identifying candidate KPIs from existing sources, (2) defining new candidate KPIs, (3) selecting appropriate KPIs based on KPI criteria, and (4) composing the selected KPIs with assigned weights into a set. The paper explains how the developed procedure complements existing indicator sets and sustainability-measurement approaches at the manufacturing process level [3].

More information on the standards, including their history, use and future development, is available by contacting NIST’s K.C. Morris. More information on ASTM standards on sustainability can be found on the ASTM Committee E60 website. In addition, the standards described on this website can be found through ASTM Subcommittee E60.13 on Sustainable Manufacturing. 

References

1. Mohr, S., Somers, K., Swartz, S., & Vanthournout, H. (2012, June 1). Manufacturing resource productivity. McKinsey Sustainability.
2. M. Mani, Madan, J., Lee, J. H., Lyons, K. W., & Gupta, S. K. (2014). Sustainability characterization for manufacturing processes. International Journal of Production Research, 52(20), 5895-5912. https://doi.org/10.1080/00207543.2014.886788
3. Mani, M., Larborn, J., Johannson, B., Lyons, K., & Morris, KC. (2016). Standard representations for sustainability characterization of industrial processes. Journal of Manufacturing Science and Engineering. https://doi.org/10.1115/1.4033922
4. M. Mani, Madan, J., Lee, J. H., Lyons, K. W., & Gupta, S. K. (2014). Sustainability characterization for manufacturing processes. International Journal of Production Research, 52(20), 5895-5912. https://doi.org/10.1080/00207543.2014.886788
5. Kibira, D., Brundage, M., Feng, S., and Morris, K., “Procedure for Selecting Key Performance Indicators for Sustainable Manufacturing,” Journal of Manufacturing Science and Engineering, 140(1), 011005, November 3, 2017, Paper No: MANU-17-1464, doi: 10.1115/1.4037439. https://doi.org/10.1115/1.4037439
6. Mani, M., Larborn, J., Johannson, B., Lyons, K., & Morris, KC. (2016). Standard representations for sustainability characterization of industrial processes. Journal of Manufacturing Science and Engineering. https://doi.org/10.1115/1.4033922
7. L. Rebouillata, I. Barlettaa, M.Mani, B. Johansson, ‘Understanding sustainability data through unit manufacturing process representations: a case study on stone production,’ Accepted 49th CIRP Conference on Manufacturing Systems, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.procir.2016.11.119
8. Madan, Jatinder, Mahesh Mani, Jae Hyun Lee, and Kevin W. Lyons. "Energy performance evaluation and improvement of unit-manufacturing processes: injection molding case study." Journal of Cleaner Production 105 (2015): 157-170. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2014.09.060
9. Garretson, Ian C., Kevin W. Lyons, Mahesh Mani, Swee Leong, Matthew D. Carter, Ann E. Simmons, and Karl R. Haapala. "Unit Manufacturing Process Models for Ferromagnetic and Non-Ferromagnetic Alloy Surface Inspection Methods." In ASME 2015 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and Information in Engineering Conference, pp. V004T05A044-V004T05A044. American Society of Mechanical Engineers, 2015. https://doi.org/10.1115/DETC2015-46765
10. M. Mani, Lyons, K. W., & Gupta, S. K. (2014). Sustainability Characterization for Additive Manufacturing. Journal of Research of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Volume 119 (2014). http://dx.doi.org/10.6028/jres.119.016
11. Madan, Jatinder, Mahesh Mani, and Kevin W. Lyons. "Characterizing energy consumption of the injection molding process." In Proceedings of the ASME 2013 international manufacturing science and engineering conference. 2013. https://doi.org/10.1115/MSEC2013-1222
12.  Watkins, Megan F., Mahesh Mani, Kevin W. Lyons, and S. K. Gupta. "Sustainability characterization for die casting process." In ASME 2013 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and Information in Engineering Conference, Paper No. DETC2013-12634. American Society of Mechanical Engineers, 2013. https://doi.org/10.1115/DETC2013-12634
13. Valivullah, Lina, Mahesh Mani, Kevin W. Lyons, and S. K. Gupta. "Manufacturing Process Information Models for Sustainable Manufacturing." In ASME 2014 International Manufacturing Science and Engineering Conference collocated with the JSME 2014 International Conference on Materials and Processing and the 42nd North American Manufacturing Research Conference, Paper No: MSEC2014-4105. American Society of Mechanical Engineers, 2014. https://doi.org/10.1115/MSEC2014-4105