SUMMARY

Environmentally conscious manufacturing has been gaining a lot of attention in recent times. Managing environmental burdens created during the manufacturing process is necessary to limit the negative impact on the environment experienced by these burdens. Negatively impacting the environment can jeopardize resource supply chains, lead to health issues, and cause other significant problems with day-to-day life. The first step in determining the impact a manufacturing process has is to quantify current environmental releases produced during manufacturing. Traditional Life Cycle Assessment approaches lack resolution and detail required to perform analysis on the manufacturing process. More detailed assessments use various approaches have two problems. Firstly, these approaches tend to be case based studies, making them inflexible. Secondly, assessments are prepared with a document based approach. The purpose of this thesis is to update and refine a traditional approach to environmentally conscious manufacturing analysis by taking advantage of recent advances in computers and computing technology. A model based approach is used to give the analysis flexibility over case based analysis, while a traditional Activity-Based Costing (ABC) approach is used to give the model structure. The model is constructed with the object oriented modeling language SysML. The final model is called an Activity-Based Object Oriented Manufacturing Model, or ABOOM Model. This thesis tests whether SysML is 1) capable of creating such a model, 2) capable of returning meaningful results, and 3) can retain a degree of user friendliness. Results show that with an ABC based organizational structure known as an Activity Space, SysML is capable of constructing such a model. With the use of the plug-in ParaMagic, the ABOOM Model is capable of returning meaningful results. A comparison with an assessment tool called Homer shows that the ABOOM Model has comparable usability and user friendliness.