The sustainability of industrial production systems is considered to be the key to promoting green transformation and upgrading of manufacturing industry. This study proposes an emergy-based method for the measurement and evaluation of the sustainability of industrial production systems. The method uses emergy as a measure, expresses all types of inputs and outputs of production systems in terms of solar emergy, and constructs indicators for the sustainable evaluation of industrial production systems that account for economic and environmental benefits from the perspectives of system functions, ecology, and sustainability. This method was applied to a disc cam machining system at a machinery company, where the user was able to quantify the sustainability of the production system and, through feedback, optimise the production process to reduce energy consumption and environmental pollution and improve the sustainability of the production process. The results show that after optimization, the emergy yield ratio of the disc cam machining system is increased from 1.45 to 4.32, the environmental load ratio is reduced by 16%, and the emergy-based sustainability index is increased by 85%. The system has long-term sustainable development capability in the future. This study provides a new theoretical perspective on sustainability assessments of industrial production systems, and our findings provide a scientific basis for guiding the sound operation and sustainable development of industrial production systems.
Keywords: Emergy; Evaluation; Industrial production; Measurement; Sustainability.
© 2022. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.