Manufacturing companies are striving for more environment-friendly operations and products, creating an increased need for a balance between environment friendliness and efficiency gains. This can be done by integrating and implementing lean and green practices simultaneously. To attain this objective, this paper presents a green-modified value stream mapping model, which uses carbon efficiency and carbon emission as evaluation indicators. The model identifies the integrating level of time flow, energy flow, material flow, and transportation flow at each phase of the production process from the perspective of seven wastes and converts them into carbon emission flow. The proposed framework can visualise and assess the manufacturing process performance and help overcome the challenges associated with integrating and implementing lean and green practices. In addition, a mathematical model of carbon efficiency is established to analyse and calculate carbon emission flow of all types of wastes to identify opportunities for improvements in eliminating wastes. The effectiveness of this method is demonstrated with a case study of a manufacturing unit producing metal stamped parts. Further studies are required to test the proposed framework under various fields including other manufacturing fields to improve the practical validity and expand the application scope.

In the context of Industry 4.0, the lean–green manufacturing system has brought many advantages and challenges to industrial participants. Security is one of the main challenges encountered in the new industrial environment, because smart factory applications can easily expose the vulnerability of manufacturing and threaten the operational security of the whole system. It is difficult to address the problem of the brittleness factor in manufacturing systems. Therefore, building on vulnerability theory, this study proposes a vulnerability index system for lean–green manufacturing systems in a manufacturing company in the context of Industry 4.0. The index has four dimensions: human factors, equipment factors, environmental factors, and other factors. The Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) approach was used to calculate the degree of influence, the degree of being influenced, and the centrality and causes of the factors. The causal relationships and key influences between the factors were identified. Then, the dependence and hierarchy of each of the key influencing factors were analyzed using the Matrix-Based Cross-Impact Multiplication Applied to Classification (MICMAC) and Interpretative Structural Model (ISM) methods, and a hierarchical structural model of the factors was constructed. Finally, an intelligent manufacturing system that produces a micro-acoustic material and device was used as an example to verify the accuracy of the proposed method. The results show that the method not only identifies the key brittleness factors in a lean–green manufacturing system but can also provide a guarantee for the safe operation of a manufacturing system. This study provides theoretical guidance for the effective management of intelligent manufacturing systems; moreover, it lays a foundation and provides a new methodology for assessing the vulnerability of manufacturing systems.

Intelligent manufacturing workshop uses automatic guided vehicles as an important logistics and transportation carrier, and most of the existing research adopts the intelligent manufacturing workshop layout and Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) path step-by-step optimization, which leads to problems such as low AGV operation efficiency and inability to achieve the optimal layout. For this reason, a smart manufacturing assembly line layout optimization model considering AGV path planning with the objective of minimizing the amount of material flow and the shortest AGV path is designed for the machining shop of a discrete manufacturing enterprise of a smart manufacturing company. Firstly, the information of the current node, the next node and the target node is added to the heuristic information, and the dynamic adjustment factor is added to make the heuristic information guiding in the early stage and the pheromone guiding in the later stage of iteration; secondly, the Laplace distribution is introduced to regulate the volatilization of the pheromone in the pheromone updating of the ant colony algorithm, which speeds up the speed of convergence; the path obtained by the ant colony algorithm is subjected to the deletion of the bi-directional redundant nodes, which enhances the path smoothing degree; and finally, the improved ant colony algorithm is fused with the improved dynamic window algorithm, so as to enable the robots to arrive at the end point safely. Simulation shows that in the same map environment, the ant colony algorithm compared with the basic ant colony algorithm reduces the path length by 40% to 67% compared to the basic ant colony algorithm and reduces the path inflection points by 34% to 60%, which is more suitable for complex environments. It also verifies the feasibility and superiority of the conflict-free path optimization strategy in solving the production scheduling problem of the flexible machining operation shop.

The existing research and practices have shown that the coordinated implementation of lean-green manufacturing can have a positive impact on the economic and environmental benefits, which is an effective means to ensure the environmental protection of the production process of manufacturing without damaging their profitability. Within the field of lean-green research, there is still a lack of research to analyze the driving factors for the collaborative implementation of integrated lean and green integration. Although, some scholars and researchers have studied lean and green integration paradigms, their research has mostly focused on lean-green integration practices and their impact on environmental performance and their respective operations. In the context of Industry 4.0, this article investigates the driving forces behind the collaborative integration implementation of a lean-green manufacturing system from the viewpoint of stakeholders. Specifically addressing the issues of correlation and ambiguity in the identification of driving factors, this manuscript proposes an Interpretation Structure Model (ISM) of fuzzy comprehensive Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), based on Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL), to determine the importance of the driving factors. Combined with the complex network theory, the evaluation index system is divided into four levels from eight factor categories, including endogenous lean-green driving factors and exogenous driving factors. The fuzzy AHP-DEMATEL-ISM is used to analyze the relationship between indicators and the structure of the indicator system. The complex network which is composed of the indicator system is divided into different levels. The importance of indicators is analyzed from the perspective of the global network, and key factors affecting the driving of lean-green system is analyzed. The integration of the lean-green manufacturing system and organizational synergy are promoted to jointly lead the enterprise toward sustainable development by paying particular attention to the primary impact indicators and aggressively cultivating the key impact indicators.

Practising lean and green method has become important for organisations seeking competitiveness and environmental sustainability. The efficiency and validity of personnel (employees) in organisation management is an index to measure sustainability. Employees are the primary key factor in maintaining organisation management. In this study, a framework model was developed from the perspective of personnel integration, aiming to implement coordinated and sustainable management of lean-green enterprises. During the practice of lean-green in manufacturing companies, a model was constructed using an analytical network process and interpretation structural modelling. These models involve dynamic common indexes of cross-sector objective evaluation and artificial barriers in deep analysis. Horizontal and vertical personnel integrations were achieved based on this model. The proposed model is beneficial for deep personnel integration and lays a solid foundation for lean-green coordinated development.

In order to solve the problems of high carbon emissions, low distribution efficiency and high costs related to the process of material distribution in manufacturing workshops, a multi-objective workshop material distribution path optimization problem model is established, and the model is solved using an improved genetic algorithm. The problem is processed using Gray code and crossover and variation operations with a genetic algorithm. To improve the search accuracy and convergence speed of the algorithm, an adaptive mutation method is proposed to enhance the diversity of the population and to achieve global optimal path objective finding. The improved algorithm is applied to workshop path multi-station logistics path planning, which effectively solves the transport path optimization and station solving problems in workshop logistics distribution, and the convergence speed and convergence accuracy of the algorithm are significantly improved. Finally, a simulation analysis is carried out on the optimization of the production material distribution of a smart gas meter workshop owned by K Company, which is an electronic assembly manufacturing company. We used MATLAB software for the case company logistics distribution route model for data analysis and solving. Due to the consideration of carbon emissions, we did not consider two kinds of experiments, which were two different cases of the optimal path. The experimental results verify that the distribution optimization scheduling model can meet the demands for immediate material distribution in the production workshop, which is conducive to improving material distribution efficiency, reducing logistics costs and achieving the goal of lowering carbon emissions. This optimization model has a certain utility in that in the current context of aiming for carbon neutral and carbon peaking, early low carbon distribution layout can reduce the environmental cost of the enterprise, making material distribution a more environmental economic path.