AI and IoT for Promoting Green Operation and Sustainable Environment

Dear Colleagues,

Green operation is a business strategy that focuses on profitability through environmentally friendly operating processes. Essentially, it is the “greening” of the whole life cycle of production, ranging from design, manufacturing, the reduction in wastewater and pollution, packaging and delivery to recycling materials. Moreover, the concept of green operation can also be extended to a series of dense and hierarchically associated systems, including green purchase, green manufacturing, green sales and green supply chain, so as to plan how to achieve the goal of comprehensive green environment and health.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT) are two important tools for achieving green environment and health, especially in the monitoring of production equipment. During green operation, in the case of the sudden occurrence of equipment failure, the maintenance cost of the system is bound to increase, which will further affect the production efficiency of the enterprise. In addition, the loss and damage of materials will not only increase the production cost, but also reduce efficiency and create an environmental burden. Fortunately, to solve this problem, AI and the IoT can be applied for the precognition and diagnosis of issues in the production process to help analyze the abnormal data of the equipment on the actual production line. These methods can monitor the "health status" of machines through customized systems and connect with the remote maintenance and components control system. Therefore, with the help of AI and IoT, production equipment can reduce "accidents" and optimize green operation. In summary, with the assistance of AI and IoT techniques, green thinking can pervade the whole life cycle of product manufacturing (e.g., plants, the production line, machines, products and supply chains), from the perspective of system monitoring. Moreover, smart layer-by-layer system monitoring can be used to direct factories and enterprises using green and intelligent manufacturing, promoting green operation and creating a sustainable environment.

Prof. Dr. Chia-Huei Wu
Prof. Dr. Wei Liu
Topic Editors