APMS 2013 International Conference Sustainable Production and Service Supply Chains September 9 -12, 2013 – State College, PA, USA Special Session Sustainability Characterization for Product Assembly and Supply Chain 1. Description In product assemblies, parts and components primarily come from two sources: in-house manufacturing and supply chains. Today, OEMs, if not contract out their entire manufacturing, have assembly-centric product systems with components and subsystems delivered by suppliers. For sustainability characterization, OEMs require traceable measurement and aggregation methods for sustainability assessment of product assembly and logistics operations across supply chains. Current approaches rely on Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) for sustainability assessment. Compared to the assembly process and supply chain modeling approach, the current LCI approaches are limited in providing manufacturers with adequate accuracy and traceability. This special session calls for research contributions in the area of product assembly process and supply chain modeling. The main purpose is to provide a forum for sharing advanced methodologies for sustainability computations of a product, including supply chains. 2. Topics: The topics of interest include, but are not limited to: Ontology, including taxonomy, for product assembly processes, logistics processes, and supply chain operations to support reuse and composition of sustainability data in those processes. Use case and requirement analyses in product assembly and supply chain sustainability Metrics and measurement methods for sustainability characterization of assembly and disassembly processes Sustainability models of logistics processes, e.g., material transportation, material handling, packaging, and warehousing Plant/facility-level sustainability characterizations including plants, warehouses, and distribution centers Energy and material flow modeling and aggregation methods of distributed manufacturing 3. Organizers of the Special Session Shaw Feng, NIST Serm Kulvatunyou, NIST Nenad Ivezic, NIST Richard Bank, Sustainable Supply Chain Foundation Kincho Law, Stanford University Arpad Hovarth, UC Berkeley (TBD) Richard Murphy, Murphy Warehouse Company (TBD) Seog-chan Oh, GM (TBD) Matthew Carter, Boeing (TBD)