Toward sustainable manufacturing through PLM, GIS and LCA interaction

With today´s global awareness of environmental issue as well as social and economic aspects, manufacturing industry is seeking a comprehensive strategic approach to be more sustainable. By continuous sharing of information among the different product lifecycle phases, product lifecycle management acts as an information strategy, which builds a coherent data structure by consolidating systems. Moreover, when the manufacturing is happening, there is location base information available within manufacturing process, which can be used into tools to assess manufacturing process in context of sustainability. This paper presents a new information strategy framework for the green manufacturing paradigm based on integration between current PLM structure and geographical information systems. The proposed IT framework is a comprehensive qualitative answer to the question of how to design and/or improve green manufacturing systems as well as a roadmap for future quantitative research to better evaluate this new paradigm.