Virtual Verification and Validation to Enhance Sustainability of Manufacturing Systems

In this paper, the concept of Sustainable Manufacturing (SM) is discussed, and the focus is put on the elimination of wastes in a product’s life cycle. Recent development on enabling technologies to advance SM are surveyed to identify promising research areas. We have found virtual Verification and Validation (V&V) should be promoted to enhance the sustainability especially in Small and Medium sized Enterprises (SMEs). V&V are typically non-value-added and the effects on V&V should be minimized; while due to lack of expertise, most of SMEs rely heavily on prototyping and physical experiments to evaluate their products. We propose virtual V&V to replace physical experiments to the maximum extent. To show the significance of the proposed concept, a case study of virtual V&V system is developed to reduce the needs of physical prototyping and testing in product development. This benefits greatly to (1) cost savings by replacing numerous physical prototyping and testing by virtual V&V, (2) lead-time reduction for new product to enter emerging markets, and (3) global optimization of product design by analyzing and exploring a large number of design options. The improvement at these aspects contributes to system sustainability significantly. The concept of using virtual V&V to reduce non-value-added prototyping and testing is applicable to manufacturing businesses in most of SMEs who design and test their own products. Note to Practitioners —This work is highly motivated by a number of the authors’ industry projects with regional SMEs who put heavy investments in testing to prove products’ quality to clients before the orders for products can be awarded; manufacturing businesses related to testing are non-value-added that should be minimized from the perspective of sustainability. Virtual V&V is proposed as a vital solution to overcome their dilemma, and the proposed solution has its theoretical and practical significance to reduce wastes, shorten lead-times, and optimize products based on parametric study for a wide scope of design alternatives. This helps to increase the lifespan of SMEs ultimately