Design and development of a sustainability toolkit for simulation modeling and analysis

A simulation-based sustainability toolkit is developed in this research, in order to efficiently provide the capability of modeling and evaluating the sustainability related performance measures in systems of interest. As sustainability related issues, such as energy consumption, emissions, and waste generation are becoming a more integrated part of operational and long-term planning decisions, simulation modeling is needed to analyze the system performance not only from the traditional system performance measures such as productivity and efficiency, but also taking into account the environmental impacts within the studied system in order to aid in decision-making. This research introduces the concept and general methodology to develop such a sustainability toolkit for simulation and provides a prototype implementation of the toolkit using commercially available discrete event simulation software. In particular, toolkit modules have been developed for modeling and evaluating the sustainability aspects of transportation and logistics systems, industrial and manufacturing processes, and warehouse material handling systems. Furthermore, general sustainability toolkit modules are constructed to model other systems of interest. The toolkit contains a flexible framework which enables the simulation modeling and analysis of the sustainability related performance measures as easily as traditional system performance measures. The toolkit will enable the users to efficiently simulate complex systems taking into account system sustainability in an integrated decision-making process