Proposal of a model for life cycle simulation and optimization of industrial equipment

The transformation of advanced industries from a resource intensive to a sustainable knowledge-based industrial environment is a focal objective of the Western countries and institutions. If on the one hand Life Cycle Simulation (LCS) can be seen as a new approach for supporting designers and engineers in their work for creating optimized and sustainable solutions, on the other hand an in-depth review of the state of the art has revealed how LCS system developed so far have been specific to particular research purposes and had limited functions. The present paper proposes a model to simulate and optimize life cycle costs and environmental impacts of industrial equipment: simulation is implemented by means of Discrete Event Simulation (DES), while a genetic algorithm performs optimization.