An integrated E-supply chain model for agile and environmentally conscious manufacturing

This paper presents for the first time a mathematically sound model for design and optimization of supply chains in terms of such important performance indexes as product cost, cycle time, quality, energy and environmental impact in the context of global and Internet-based manufacturing. The two layer model is a hyper-network of material flows overlaid with an e-business information network. It extends from a traditional supply chain having suppliers, distributors, and users to include end-of-life product collectors and demanufacturers. Furthermore, it extends the performance considerations from cost and productivity to include environmental performance. Such extensions allow one to develop Internet-based manufacturing systems that are agile and can produce desired products with the minimum environmental impact over their life cycles. The research results can help manufacturers enhance their competitiveness balanced with environmental responsibility, thereby resulting in sustainable economy. Since the optimization goals are not easily quantified and exact numbers may not mean much to managers and designers, fuzzy logic-based optimization goals are used in the proposed multi-objective optimization model. It can attack typical problems in configuring Internet-based manufacturing systems, such as partner selection and transportation mode selection based on the above-mentioned characteristic of individual partners and links in a model. A personal computer (PC) containing such mechatronic components as hard disk driver, keyboard, and mouse is used as an example to illustrate the application of the proposed integrated e-supply chain model.