Professor Fazleena Badurdeen

Professor of Mechanical Engineering
University of Kentucky, USA

Towards Product Design for Circular Economy in Industry 4.0 Era

Abstract:

To advance the Circular Economy and enhance sustainability performance product development practices must focus on a multi-lifecycle and closed-loop approach to material flow. Integrating the 6Rs of Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Recover, Redesign and Remanufacture, Product Design for Circular Economy (PDCE) can enable materials/resources to flow through multiple lifecycles increasing end-of-life value recovery opportunities. Comprehensive decision support tools for PDCE can significantly enhance capabilities of the design community to evaluate alternatives and identify more sustainable product designs that can also increase business competitiveness. The utility and effectiveness these tools depends on access to product data for economic, environmental and societal metrics from pre-manufacturing, manufacturing and use through post-use stages. Data from different lifecycle stages is, however, stored in disparate and incompatible systems limiting their interoperability. Thus, in the emerging Industry 4.0 era, next generation PDCE tools must be interfaced with lifecycle data repositories to enhance capabilities for sustainable product design. Digital integration can enable better collaboration among product designers, manufacturing engineers, supply chain partners and other stakeholders during the product design process. This presentation will address the fundamental requirements for PDCE, and present a comprehensive suite of decision support tools to enable more sustainable product design. A novel framework with an interoperable digital thread to integrate data sources from different lifecycle stages to conduct predictive analyses for robust product design decision making will also be examined.


Fazleena Badurdeen

Biography:

Dr. Fazleena Badurdeen is a Professor in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Kentucky (UK) and is also the Director of Graduate Studies for the online Manufacturing Systems Engineering MS Program. She is a core member of the university's Institute for Sustainable Manufacturing, an internationally recognized center of excellence on sustainable products, processes and systems. Dr. Badurdeen's research interests are in sustainable product design, modeling and analysis of manufacturing systems and supply chains including the development of tools and visualization techniques to support decision making in these areas. Dr. Badurdeen's research has been funded by federal agencies such as the Department of Defense, National Science Foundation, and the National Institute for Standards and Technology as well as companies including GE Aviation, GE Transportation, and Coronado Mines. She has published over 150 peer reviewed papers and her team has received numerous accolades for their research. She is the founding Chair of the International Forum on Sustainable Manufacturing, is an Associate Editor for the Resources, Conservation, and Recycling journal, and serves on the editorial boards of a number of other journals. She is a member of the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers (IISE) and the Society of Manufacturing Engineers (SME). Dr. Badurdeen received her PhD in Integrated (Industrial and Mechanical) Engineering and MS in Industrial Engineering both from Ohio University, USA. She also holds an MBA from the Postgraduate Institute of Management, Sri Lanka and BS in Engineering from the University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka.



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