Simulation plays a critical role in the design of products, materials and manufacturing processes. Increasingly, simulation is replacing physical tests to ensure product reliability and quality thereby facilitating steady reductions in design cycles.
 
However, with the current global environmental crisis, there are gaps in the simulation tools used by industry to provide reliable results from which effective and equitable decisions can be made regarding environmental impacts at different stages of product realization and life cycle.
 
When designing products, designers must cater for a multitude of technical, economic, social, environmental, and political requirements among others. This phase helps identify and conceptualize a marketable product, and create the complete description of it. With today’s growing concerns for green products and green manufacturing, generating the right product and manufacturing specifications poses significant challenge
 
To support sustainable manufacturing from a regulatory and compliance point of view, standards and inspection procedures must be studied and incorporated in the new simulation models for raw materials, manufactured part, production process parameters, including verification and calibration

• A good simulation reference architecture, investigate models that support various stages of planning.
• Dynamic scheduling with integrated manufacturing resources, sustainable material flow analysis.
• Characterization of manufacturing cells for sustainable engineering planning and simulation,
• Mapping of relevant data required at various levels of simulation,
• Develop a core manufacturing ontology for simulation purposes,
• Integration and interoperability of information at various levels,
• Case studies,
• Science based engineering simulation for characterizing different manufacturing processes in terms of the energy (source, use and efficiency, key controlling parameters),
• Identify the scope and boundaries, e.g., enterprise level, shop floor level, etc
  Integrated or extended simulation with design optimization processes to simultaneously deal with factors such as manufacturing ability.
• Cost and environmental impact.
• New models and representations that support simulation for sustainable manufacturing planning.
• The integration of simulation applications with other relevant engineering/ manufacturing applications.