Mini Special Issue on Design and Manufacturing for Environmental Sustainability

As the third special issue on Design and Manufacturing for Environmental Sustainability for IJAT, this issue focuses on design and manufacturing theories and methodologies for achieving environmental sustainability and the topic of the special issue seems to be becoming established in this journal. This special issue contains six articles consisting of a wide variety of rather novel topics emerging in the domain of design and manufacturing for environmental sustainability. The first three deal with design problem in the broader sense: designing of system of systems taking distributed energy generation systems, upgradable design problems, and selection problem of end-of-life products recovery options integrated from the view of environmental load and cost. The last three papers deal with manufacturing problems in the broader sense – motion extraction problems for disassembly automation, machine tool energy efficiency, and optimization problems related to machine tool operating conditions for increasing environmental sustainability. Some papers, revised and extended at the editor’s request, were presented originally at EcoDesign 2015, the ninth international symposium on environmentally conscious design and inverse manufacturing, held in Tokyo, Japan, 2015. The editor thanks the authors and reviewers for their comprehensive efforts in making this special issue possible and hopes these articles will encourage further research on design and manufacturing for environmental sustainability.