Life Cycle Assessment Frameworks for Sustainability in Digitally Managed Factories

Chukwuma Godfrey Ono¹, Fredrick Nnaemeka Okeagu², Ogochukwu Chinedum Chukwunedum³

^1,2,3 Lecturer, Industrial/Production Engineering Department, Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, Anambra State, Nigeria.

Abstract

Life cycle assessment based on ISO 14040 and ISO 14044 provides a structured approach for quantifying environmental burdens across product lifecycles. In manufacturing, conventional practice remains retrospective, relying on historical inventories and secondary datasets that arrive late for operational control. This manuscript examines how digitally managed factories reshape LCA through continuous data streams and integrated decision workflows. The scope covers process, product, and system level applications, digital enablers, integration barriers, and design requirements for a digitally enabled LCA framework. Evidence synthesized from the reviewed literature links IoT sensing, ERP and MES records, cyber physical systems, digital twins, cloud computing, big data analytics, and AI or ML to inventory refresh, scenario testing, and near real time sustainability KPIs. Dynamic LCA platforms report inventory and impact updates on hourly to daily cycles, supporting adaptive assessment as production configurations and energy sources change. Reported applications include organizational LCA in ceramic tile manufacturing and digital twin-based assessment of material flows in intralogistics. Four integration barriers dominate, data quality and heterogeneity with weak interoperability, computational complexity and scalability limits, standardization gaps between ISO LCA semantics and digital platforms including ISO 23247 scope mismatch, and organizational resistance linked to skills and governance deficits. A digitally enabled LCA framework is specified through five requirements, real time operation, scalability, interoperability, provenance, and KPI integration with factory control loops for accountable sustainability management across suppliers and logistics networks.

Keywords: Life cycle assessment, Digitally managed factories, Dynamic LCA, Digital twins, Sustainability KPIs

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