Sustainable manufacturing is one of the key challenges of producers all around the world. Despite the frequent use of the term sustainability, it is not clear in an operational way what sustainability means applied to different industries and products. This paper addresses the machine tool industry and proposes specific tools and methods to enable sustainable design of future machine tools, as an enabler for sustainable manufacturing. The literature review is divided into two main parts.
Initially, the sustainability concept is discussed, from a broad level to a more product-focused one, showing the main indicators to measure product sustainability. However, the assessment and evaluation of the three dimensions involved in sustainability is a multi-criteria problem. Accordingly, necessary issues and concepts on the multi-criteria analysis theory to the measurement and evaluation will be reviewed. The main contributions of this paper are a machine tool sustainability index (MTSI) for assessing the sustainability of machine tools and a design support system (DSS) for assisting designers in building more sustainable machine tools. Although the MTSI has been specifically developed for the machine tool industry, the DSS is a valid tool for designing sustainable products considering economic, environmental and social aspects in any industry.
