Hybrid Exergetic Analysis-LCA approach and the Industry 4.0 paradigm: Assessing Manufacturing Sustainability in an Italian SME

Assessing sustainability of manufacturing is a fundamental prerequisite to the improvement of efficiency or effectiveness of manufacturing processes. The LCA is used to estimate the resource consumption along the life-cycle, while the exergy analysis introduces hints about the quality of resource consumption. The hybrid analysis descending from combining these two approaches has been proved to be a powerful tool to recognize the process optimization opportunities, as well as improvements and/or innovation paths of manufacturing processes. The incoming Industry 4.0 paradigm, providing new on-time information on the process status, is going to strongly improve this approach. The article analyzes the existing hybrid approaches and their potential features by the grace of an industrial case of an Italian SME where the Industry 4.0 is taking place. The company redesigned its sensing systems and partially the manufacturing organization as a function of the manufacturing predictability.