Sustainable scheduling: development and implementation of a hybrid model for operations scheduling based on NEH heuristics and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA)

Abstract

The issues surrounding sustainable development is the goal of proactive companies, such as developing sustainable business models, and efforts toward reducing energy consumption, increasing efficiency in the use of materials, and to reduce water consumption and minimize pollutant emissions not only into manufacturing processes, but rather from a product life cycle perspective. To do so, it is necessary to perform a Life Cycle Management (LCM) of production systems and integrate LCM with topics of Production Planning and Control (PPC). Thus, this research project aims to develop and to test a scheduling model that integrates LCM with PPC issues. For this, in the context of LCM, the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) technique will be used as a basis to integrate aspects of environmental performance within the scheduling of a production system. The scheduling will be performed based on the NEH heuristics for a case study in a company that produces metal labels. The optimization of the manufacture of metal labels will be given by the sustainable scheduling model, based on the criteria: higher profit margin, shorter processing time and lower environmental impact. Thus, the expected results will be the development of a model that allows a more sustainable scheduling, and that can be used also in other applications and for several types of production systems.