Notice and Invitation

Oral Defense of Doctoral Dissertation

The Volgenau School of Engineering, George Mason University 

Guodong Shao

Decision Guidance for Sustainable Manufacturing

Thursday, March 28, 2013, 2:00pm – 4:00pm
The Engineering Bldg. Room 4201

All are invited to attend.

Committee
Alexander Brodsky, Co-Director

Paul Ammann, Co-Director
Daniel Menascé

David Schum

Abstract

Sustainable manufacturing has significant impacts on a company’s business performance and competitiveness in today’s world. A growing number of manufacturing industries are initiating efforts to address sustainability issues; however, to achieve a higher level of sustainability, manufacturers need methodologies for formally describing, analyzing, evaluating, and optimizing sustainability performance metrics for manufacturing processes and systems. Currently, such methodologies are missing.

This dissertation developed the Sustainable Process Description and Analytics (SPDA) formalism and a systematic decision guidance methodology to fill the research gaps. The methodology provides step-by-step guidance for sustainability performance analysis and decision optimization using the SPDA formalism. The SPDA formalism provides unified syntax and semantics for querying, what-if analysis, and decision optimization; is modular, extensible, and reusable; supports built-in process and sustainability metrics modeling that enable users using data from production, energy management, life cycle assessment reference for modeling and analysis; is easy to use by manufacturing and business users; and also provides a reduction procedure that enables the translations of the SPDA query into specialized models such as optimization or simulation model for decision guidance. Two real world sustainable manufacturing case studies have been performed to demonstrate the use of formalism and the methodology.

A copy of this doctoral dissertation is on reserve at the Johnson Center Library.