A novel indicator for sustainability in production planning using Center of Gravity-based assessment of Pareto fronts

In sustainable manufacturing, the comparison of different production processes has become increasingly important in recent years due to societal and political demands on companies to obtain a more sustainable business structure. At the shop floor level, production planning based on existing processes is usually approached through mathematical optimization, leading to a Pareto front under multiple conflicting criteria. The decision to exchange production processes then leads to the comparison and evaluation of different Pareto fronts. Here, analyzing the structure of Pareto fronts via performance indicators-such as hypervolume, Euclidean distances, etc.-are often the order of the day. However, respective indicators are often neither easy to communicate to decision-makers nor meaningful regarding economic and environmental impacts when processes are changed. Consequently, we propose a Center of Gravity-based indicator to handle these issues and analyze the efficacy of the proposed method through a bicriteria energy-efficient lot-sizing and scheduling numerical scenario analysis; the conflicting criteria under consideration are electricity costs and indirect emissions. Ultimately, we discuss the selected theoretical properties and approximation features of the proposed concept, and elaborate on the communicational benefits of the new tool.