Patent ID: 7908022

Claim:
A method of optimizing a manufacturing process so as to reduce toxic waste in such manufacturing process, comprising: describing the manufacturing process using a plurality of nodes, each node representing a component or a process; connecting the plurality of nodes with directed edges to form a directed graph, the directed graph representing possible manufacturing process flows from a begin node to an end node; assigning to each edge a value representative of a cost resulting from toxic waste generated by a component or process; and determining, using a data processing system including at least one central processing unit, a shortest path from the begin node to the end node in the directed graph to identify a manufacturing process flow having a minimum cost, the determining comprising: building a cost matrix representing an array of the plurality of nodes; and executing a shortest path algorithm on the cost matrix to determine the shortest path from the begin node to the end node in the directed graph; wherein values in the cost matrix represent the edge values between nodes, wherein the shortest path algorithm comprises a modified Dijkstra's shortest path algorithm, and wherein the shortest path algorithm is run from the end node instead of the begin node, to determine the shortest path from the begin node to the end node in the directed graph.