Faceted classification of manufacturing processes for sustainability performance evaluation

Sustainability characterization of manufacturing processes is key to the inventory data development for life cycle analysis of products and processes in manufacturing industries. The ability of an organization to compare and contrast this sustainability performance in a variety of manufacturing process categories is crucial for purposes of evaluating and improving the process performance or doing tradeoff analysis for dealing with suboptimal performance. In such a situation, it is necessary to abstract this information into broader, aggregated, and consistent viewpoints such that similarities and contrasts in sustainability performance are visually deliberated. For developing such a visual system, the abstracted viewpoint should be transformed to a process classification scheme. A faceted approach to manufacturing process classifications has been proposed in this work for this purpose. We developed a visual interface to navigate the process classification scheme. We also provide a means by which dynamic hierarchical taxonomies can be generated by ranking the abstracted viewpoints called facets and classifiers.