| Popis: |
The resources of our world are globally not equally distributed. Therefore, not only the production processes themselves, but also their locations, have an impact on environmental sustainability of products. Depending on the location, different opportunities exist for the procurement and disposal of materials, water or energy. However, it is not always sustainable to operate a production process at the location with the best possible environmental conditions, as this results in corresponding transportation efforts that are also associated with ecological consequences. To resolve this trade-off, companies need a methodology to transparently evaluate the ecological sustainability of manufacturing network configurations. Despite the increasing importance of sustainability, so far only insufficient approaches exist for such an evaluation. Established evaluation methods for manufacturing networks focus on objectives such as cost, quality, flexibility, and delivery capability. Existing sustainability evaluation methods consider products, processes or companies without evaluating them in the context of changing environmental conditions. Therefore, the research question of this thesis is: How can the configuration of a global manufacturing network be evaluated in terms of ecological sustainability while considering effort and transparency? The methodology developed to answer the research question is composed of three phases. The first phase enables a structured analysis on how manufacturing network configurations influence ecological sustainability objectives. The second phase serves to model the sustainability relevant characteristics of network configurations. Based on these results, the third phase evaluates the ecological sustainability of manufacturing network configurations. |
