A METHOD FOR DETERMINING THE ENVIRONMENTAL FOOTPRINT OF INDUSTRIAL PRODUCTS USING SIMULATION

Published

December 14, 2011

Author(s)

Erik Lindskog, Linus Lundh, Jonatan K. Berglund, Yung-Tsun Lee, Anders Skoogh, Bjorn Johansson

Abstract

Effective assessment and communication of environmental footprint is increasingly important to process development and marketing purposes. Traditionally, static methods have been applied to analyze the environmental impact during a product's life cycle, however they lack the possibility to include dynamic aspects of real world operations. This paper discusses a method using Discrete Event Simulation (DES) to analyze production systems and simultaneously enable labeling of products' environmental footprint. The method steps include data management, determination of environmental footprint and communication of the results. The method is developed during a case study of a job-shop-production facility. To evaluate the method, the case study results were compared with the results of a Simplified Life Cycle Assessment (SLCA) that was conducted on the same production system. The case study demonstrates the possibility to determine the variation between products in terms of environmental footprint but also highlights some of the difficulties involved.

Proceedings Title

Proceedings of the 2011 Winter Simulation Conference

Conference Dates

December 11-14, 2011

Conference Location

Pheonix, AZ, US

Pub Type

Conferences

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Keywords

environmental footprint, simulation Simplified Life Cycle Assessment (SLCA), Product Life Cycle

Citation

Lindskog, E. , Lundh, L. , Berglund, J. , Lee, Y. , Skoogh, A. and Johansson, B. (2011), A METHOD FOR DETERMINING THE ENVIRONMENTAL FOOTPRINT OF INDUSTRIAL PRODUCTS USING SIMULATION, Proceedings of the 2011 Winter Simulation Conference, Pheonix, AZ, US, [online], https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=908883 (Accessed October 12, 2025)