A hybrid multi-objective based approach for sustainable process plan generation in a reconfigurable manufacturing environment
Abstract
Nowadays, in a hotly competitive manufacturing environment, one of the main challenges for companies is to minimize their costs of production and to be environmentally benign simultaneously. One of the answers lies in the optimal utilization of energy by manufacturing processes. In this paper, we attempt to obtain a partially “sustainable” reconfigurable manufacturing system, by considering the greenhouse gases emission (GHG) as a criterion in addition to the traditional two criteria, respectively, cost and time. In order to do so, we propose a hybrid multi-objective approach, combining the strengths of MOILP `Multi-Objective Integer Linear Programming' and the evolutionary algorithm AMOSA `Archived Multi-Objective Simulated-Annealing' to solve the process plan generation prob- lem of an RMS. More specifically, three criteria are considered, respectively, the total production cost, the completion time and the amount of GHG emitted during the product manufacturing. To illustrate the applicability of the developed approach, a simple example is presented and the numerical results analyzed.