Quantification of a highly qualitative term 'sustainability', especially from the perspective of manufacturing, is a contemporary issue. An inference mechanism, based on approximate reasoning, is required to tackle the complexities and uncertainties of the manufacturing domain. The work presents development of a fuzzy rule-based system to quantify sustainability of the most widely utilized manufacturing process: machining. The system incorporates the effects of key control parameters of machining on several sustainability measures, as reported in the literature. The measures are categorized under the three dimensions of sustainability and contribute to the sustainability scores of the respective dimensions with different weightages. The dimensions' scores are added up in different proportions to obtain the holistic sustainability score of the process. The categories of the control parameters incorporated into the system include type of the process, work material, material hardness, tool substrate and coating, tool geometry, cutting fluids, and cutting parameters. The proposed method yields sustainability scores, ranging between 0 and 100 of machining processes against the given values of their prominent control parameters. Finally, the rule-based system is applied to three different machining processes to obtain the measures of their accomplishment levels regarding economic, environmental, and societal dimensions of sustainability. The sustainability score of each process is then obtained by summing up the three accomplishment levels under the respective weightages of the dimensions. The presented approach holds immense potentials of industrial application as it can conveniently indicate the current sustainability level of a manufacturing process, leading the practitioners to decide on its continuation or improvement.
Keywords: cutting; cutting fluid; fuzzy reasoning; fuzzy sets; sustainable machining.