A Study of Production Scheduling Optimization Considering the Carbon Emission

Since the industrial revolution from eighteenth century, human use fossil fuels to create a large number of rapid economic growths. It makes the greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere have a substantial increase, and therefore result in rising temperatures and changing climate patterns. In the majority of carbon emissions statistics, industrial production activities accounted for a large proportion. For example, the Environmental Protection Administration (2013b) statistics the CO2 emissions contribution of energy combustion for different sectors in Taiwan, the CO2 emissions of the industrial sector in 2012 accounted for 48.6% of the total emissions from fuel combustion, while energy, transport, services, and residential, and agriculture sector accounted for 10.4%, 14.2%, 13.2%, 12.9%, and 1.1%, respectively. Therefore, how to minimize the carbon emissions from industrial activities, has become a very important issue is also worth exploring. Because the production scheduling is an important issue in industrial systems, many literatures have been discussed how to determine the production sequence. In the modern society, the emphasis of environment issues makes the carbon emission of factories need to meet the requirement of international covenant. Therefore, the carbon emission should be taken into consideration in the production scheduling. When taking the carbon emission into consideration in the production scheduling systems, new objective functions may conflict with the traditional objective functions, such as maximum completion time, total flowtime, and total tardiness. Therefore, the single-objective production scheduling problems become the multi-objective ones. Besides, the production scheduling problem may be transformed into the one with constraints. For example, we want to minimize the carbon emission and total tardiness for problems with the constraint of maximum completion time or common due-date. In real production system, the operation speed of machines has the inverse relationship with carbon emission. Therefore, when solving the problems with carbon emission, the processing time of jobs will be influenced and changed. This proposal wants to develop or enhance several meta-heuristics to the optimization of production schedule under carbon emission, and discuss the influence of production schedules with/without carbon emission by comparing different production scheduling problems.

Project ID:PB10406-1319
External Project ID:MOST104-2410-H182-011