View article

In recent years, going green has become a strategic priority in manufacturing which has evolved from the growing awareness of the need for environmentally friendly processes and products. Recent trends in developing new machining strategies able to support environmental protection and prevention of pollution in balance with socioeconomic needs and technical requirements inevitably require significant efforts in fundamental understanding of the actual energy and material flows needed to meet the machining requirements. This paper describes the methodology and software, Global Reasoning for Eco-Evaluation of Machining, developed to evaluate the use phase of a machine tool system with respect to a consistent set of technical, economical, and environmental criteria, as a part of the NEXT European project. The evaluation, based on the analytic hierarchy process, is conducted at two levels: (a) the …