Concept for Automated LCA of Manufacturing Processes

Manufacturing companies are increasingly pushed towards more sustainable production by socio-political and environmental factors. In order to assess their sustainability performance, companies often use the widespread life cycle assessment (LCA) as defined by ISO 14040 and supported by various LCA software solutions. However, this is regularly associated with well-known shortcomings such as difficulties in gaining appropriate life cycle inventory data, lack of result transferability, and the amount of time needed for LCA studies. To overcome these problems, approaches for automating the LCA process have proven to be promising in other engineering disciplines (e.g., civil engineering). However, hardly any approaches to automating the LCA of manufacturing processes exist. Based on an extensive literature review, this paper presents a concept for an automated LCA of manufacturing processes. The approach consists of three steps and covers the phases of data extraction, LCA model building, and analysis. It is geared towards using implicitly existing manufacturing information and facilitating the so far mostly manual data collection and modeling processes. To conclude, an outlook is given on how the proposed concept will be further developed in an industrial setting.