The manufacturing industry is a major resource of greenhouse gas emissions. Additive manufacturing, owing to its multiple advantages, plays a critical role in innovating the current manufacturing industry, especially from a supply chain perspective. Currently, the majority of research on greenhouse gas emissions in the manufacturing industry is focused on traditional manufacturing, either single processes in the supply chain or specific case studies, indicating the lack of models on greenhouse gas emissions in additive manufacturing-enabled supply chain structures. In this work, a mathematical model is established to estimate the greenhouse gas emissions in both traditional manufacturing and additive manufacturing-enabled supply chains. Especially, to explore the advantages of additive manufacturing in terms of fast production and reduced or even eliminated the need for assembly and labor involvement, an integrated production-inventory-transportation structure is investigated for additive manufacturing in the case studies. The results indicate that a potential reduction of 26.43% in carbon emissions can be achieved by adopting additive manufacturing in the supply chain. Also, the impact of rush order rate, emission intensity, and vehicle carbon emission constant rate on the overall greenhouse gas emissions are investigated in the sensitivity analysis. Results indicate that a 20% variation in carbon emission intensity (the amount of CO2eq emissions caused by generating a unit of electricity) can lead to a 6.26% change in the total carbon emissions in additive manufacturing.

Greenhouse Gas Emission Analysis of Integrated Production-Inventory-Transportation Supply Chain Enabled by Additive Manufacturing

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/MSEC/MSEC2021/volume/85062

2021 International Manufacturing Science and Engineering Conference (MSEC2021)

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