Standardizing environmental performance evaluation of manufacturing systems through ISO 20140

Abstract

Standards play a critical role in the realization of more sustainable practices in manufacturing systems. This is especially critical considering the trends in digitization and virtualization of production systems. More data is being generated at unprecedented rates and variety than ever before. To evaluate the environmental performance of manufacturing systems, practitioners often deploy ad-hoc methods or implement one-off solutions that are difficult to replicate in similar scenarios. Such situations can drive-up costs and cause significant delays. Hence, there is a strong need for standard methods that help describe and replicate environmental performance evaluation (EPE) processes. In response, ISO 20140 provides guidelines for converting and aggregating environmental performance evaluation data. This paper provides an overview of ISO 20140, and showcases the usefulness of ISO 20140 by describing and analyzing the usage view of the EPE process. The analysis is conducted with an evaluation experiment jointly conducted by National Institute of Standards and Technology in the United States and the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Japan.