(116a) Lawrence K. Cecil Award Winner Presentation: "Life-Cycle-Based Multiscale Sustainability: Challenges and Opportunities in the Era of Industry 4.0"

The quest for sustainability reflects a crucial paradigm shift in the 21st century, which is a transition from environmental management to comprehensive sustainability assessment, followed by systematic, robust solutions for sustained economic development, environmental cleanness, and social responsibility. However, sustainability science is far from exact, and engineering sustainability is very complex in terms of scope, contents, and spatial/temporal aspects. Industrial sustainability not only studies the status quo of systems, but more importantly pathways towards a more sustainable future, all under information uncertainty and insufficient knowledge. Thus, how to characterize, analyze, design, restructure, and operate systems, from the material-product-process scale to the complex industrial system scale, in the context of life-cycle-based multiscale sustainability, is an exceedingly challenging area that needs much exploration.

In this presentation, the challenges in the research on life-cycle-based multiscale sustainability as well as the opportunities provided by Industry 4.0 technologies will be discussed. In particular, the potentials of IIoT-assisted, Digital Twin-enabled technologies will be exploited. We will show that a data and information rich environment by these technologies can greatly facilitate the realization of multi-life-cycle-stage dynamic sustainability assessment and decision making at multiple length-time scales of the system under investigation. We will introduce a preliminary framework of the life-cycle-based, digital-twin-enabled multiscale sustainability. A few case studies on sustainable surface coating/finishing will demonstrate some methodological efficacy.