Influence of Collaboration in Sustainable Manufacturing Networks

Overview & Synopsis

Recent trends towards Industry 5.0 focus on a sustainable and resilient industry, aiming to make technology and innovation more focused on humans and today’s societal concerns. Consequently, this trend also leads to more sustainable and resilient manufacturing, for which collaborative networks play a main role due to the needed involvement of multiple players, being important to consider a perspective of co-responsibility. Establishing adequate performance indicators to assess how collaborative manufacturing ecosystems can support sustainability is thus relevant. Furthermore, this work also analyses how such performance indicators can be used as an influencing factor contributing to improving the players’ behaviour, representing the idea of co-responsibility for a more sustainable manufacturing network. This article proposes a set of performance indicators and a related simulation model to set up several scenarios to analyse how collaboration can influence sustainability in horizontal manufacturing networks. Results from simulation scenarios are included and discussed.