With the enhancement of people's environmental awareness, low-carbon and energy-efficiency in manufacturing industry has been drawing much attention due to the huge consumption of raw materials and energy during machining processes. And it is a complex problem to evaluate part machining processes from the view point of carbon emission because there are many factors involved in it, such as machine tools, raw materials, energy, workshop, and so on. For solving this problem, a web-based architecture is established which mainly contains six parts, i.e., process system, process flow, data acquisition network, data transmission network, calculation of carbon emission and optimization of machine energy consumption. By introducing network technology into low-carbon manufacturing, the architecture forms a closed-loop low-carbon manufacturing system which can not only calculate the carbon emission of machining processes, but also reduce the carbon emission of a workshop with time by means of optimizing the machine energy consumption. What's more, three key enabling technologies are described in detail to make sure the evaluation architecture runs smoothly, that is, calculation of the carbon footprint, low-carbon data processing and prediction of part energy consumption.

In order to develop reasonable modular product architecture with physically detachable modules, a new systematic method for product modularization is proposed based on axiomatic design (AD). In the proposed method, the product is decomposed hierarchically in its functional, physical and process domains according to AD. After the transformation from design matrices to design structure matrices, the correlation design structure matrices of design parameters about function, structure and manufacturing process are constructed. Finally, a genetic algorithm combined with the minimal description length is introduced to solve the modularization optimization problem. To illustrate and validate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology, an indoor air conditioner unit is presented as a demonstrative example.