Produce it sustainably: Life Cycle Assessment of a Biomanufacturing Process through the Ontology Lens

Published

September 21, 2023

Author(s)

Ana Nikolov, Milos Drobnjakovic, Boonserm Kulvatunyou

Abstract

An ontological perspective to addressing sustainability issues in biomanufacturing on the journey to the circular economy is represented in this pa-per. Even though sustainability goes beyond the environmental dimension from the triple bottom line framework (including environmental, economic, and social dimensions), given the importance of the environmental dimension, this study has prioritized an ontology for LCA to account for sustainability. LCA is widely used for estimating the environmental burden of a given production process. However, several conventions currently exist for representing the data required for LCA. The inconsistencies when utilizing LCA data from multiple sources make human readability and understanding difficult, and subsequent data analysis protracted and inefficient. Therefore, we propose the alignment of terms and definitions provided by Industrial Ontologies Foundry (IOF) Core with LCA terminology from ISO 14040 guidelines. With a particular focus on CO2 emission assessment, we demonstrated how the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) ontological term formalization could be applied to a biomanufacturing process use case. The ontological representation of LCA allows easier comparative analysis between changes in a manufacturing arrangement and the corresponding LCA result. The ontology-assisted comparative analysis could potentially accelerate the identification of a manufacturing process with the lowest carbon foot-print and reveal the key contributors to carbon emissions.

Proceedings Title

Proceedings of the APMS 2023 IFIP International Conference; Advances in Production Management Systems
"Production Management Systems for Responsible Manufacturing, Service and Logistics Future"

Conference Dates

September 17-21, 2023

Conference Location

Trondheim, NO

Pub Type

Conferences

Download Paper

Local Download

Keywords

sustainability, biomanufacturing, life cycle assessment, ontology, circular economy

Citation

Nikolov, A. , Drobnjakovic, M. and Kulvatunyou, B. (2023), Produce it sustainably: Life Cycle Assessment of a Biomanufacturing Process through the Ontology Lens, Proceedings of the APMS 2023 IFIP International Conference; Advances in Production Management Systems "Production Management Systems for Responsible Manufacturing, Service and Logistics Future", Trondheim, NO, [online], https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=936957 (Accessed April 27, 2024)